Bio-fortified rice could save hundreds of thousands of lives a year, but opposition to GM crops is still preventing its approval

Biotechnology applied to crafting nutritional improvements in rice is on the verge of offering the kinds of public health benefits to Asia we haven't seen since the 20th-century's green revolution improved the nutrition and longevity of billions of people.

Last month, the Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry bestowed the prestigious Bertebos prize on Swiss plant biologist Ingo Potrykus. He is the co-inventor of "golden rice", a collection of new rice varieties biofortified, or enriched, by the introduction of genes that express beta-carotene, the precursor of vitamin A. (It is converted in the body, as needed, to the active form.)

Why was this achievement important? After all, most physicians in North America and Europe never see a single case of vitamin A deficiency in their professional lifetimes. The situation is very different in poor developing countries, however. Vitamin A deficiency is epidemic among the poor, whose diet is heavily dominated by rice (which contains neither beta-carotene nor vitamin A) or other carbohydrate-rich, vitamin-poor sources of calories.

In developing countries, 200-300 million children of preschool age are at risk of vitamin A deficiency, which can be devastating and even fatal. It increases susceptibility to common childhood infections such as measles and diarrhoeal diseases and is the single most important cause of childhood blindness in developing countries. Every year, about 500,000 children become blind as a result of vitamin A deficiency, and 70% die within a year of losing their sight.

Why not simply supplement children's diets with vitamin A in capsules or add it to some staple foodstuff, the way that we add iodine to table salt to prevent hypothyroidism and goiter? A good idea in theory, except that neither the resources – hundreds of millions of dollars annually – nor the infrastructure for distribution are available.

Enter a better, cheaper, more feasible solution: golden rice, which actually incorporates beta-carotene into the genetically altered rice grains. The concept is simple: Although rice plants do not normally synthesise beta-carotene in the endosperm (seeds) because of the absence of two necessary enzymes of the biosynthetic pathway, they do make it in the green portions of the plant. By using recombinant DNA, or gene-splicing, techniques to introduce the two genes that express these enzymes, the pathway is restored and the rice grains accumulate therapeutic amounts of beta-carotene.

Golden rice offers the potential to make contributions to human health and welfare as monumental as the discovery and distribution of the Salk polio vaccine. With wide use, it could save hundreds of thousands of lives a year and enhance the quality of life for millions more.

But one aspect of this shining story is tarnished. Intransigent opposition by anti-science, anti-technology activists - primarily Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and a few other groups – has spurred already risk-averse regulators to adopt an overly precautionary approach that has stalled approvals.

There is nothing about golden rice that should require endless case-by-case reviews and delays. As the British scientific journal Nature editorialised in 1992, a broad scientific consensus holds that "the same physical and biological laws govern the response of organisms modified by modern molecular and cellular methods and those produced by classical methods. ... [Therefore] no conceptual distinction exists between genetic modification of plants and microorganisms by classical methods or by molecular techniques that modify DNA and transfer genes."

Putting it another way, government regulation of field research with plants should focus on the traits that may be related to risk - invasiveness, weediness, toxicity, and so forth - rather than on whether one or another technique of genetic manipulation was used.

In spite of its vast potential to benefit humanity – and negligible likelihood of harm to human health or the environment – nine years after its creation, golden rice remains hung up in regulatory red tape with no end in sight. By contrast, plants constructed with less precise techniques such as hybridisation or mutagenesis are subject to no government scrutiny or requirements (or opposition from activists) at all. And that applies even to the numerous new plant varieties that have resulted from "wide crosses", hybridisations that move genes from one species or genus to another – across what used to be thought of as natural breeding boundaries.

In an April editorial in the journal Science, Nina Fedoroff, an eminent plant geneticist at Penn State who is currently serving as senior scientific adviser to Condoleezza Rice, wrote: "A new Green Revolution demands a global commitment to creating a modern agricultural infrastructure everywhere, adequate investment in training and modern laboratory facilities and progress toward simplified regulatory approaches that are responsive to accumulating evidence of safety. Do we have the will and the wisdom to make it happen?"

The golden rice story suggests that the answer is, not yet.

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Henry I. Miller, M.D.
The Hoover Institution
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6010
U.S.A.s