Block on GM rice ‘has cost millions of lives and led to child blindness’ | Hacker News Reader

Block on GM rice ‘has cost millions of lives and led to child blindness’

theguardian.com

226 pointsNoRagrets164 comments

For all the promises mentioned around this crop, this was surprising to read in the article:

/quote

As Stone and Glover point out, it is still unknown if the beta carotene in Golden Rice can even be converted to Vitamin A in the bodies of badly undernourished children.

/endquote

Given the advertising as a solution to the issue and all the surrounding hullabaloo, the fact that it is still not proven to do what it espouses--is pretty damning.

The original version of golden rice was even worse - that very definitely didn't have sufficient beta carotine to be effective. Some weird and subtle compatibility issue between the particular gene they used and the way they were trying to get it to be expressed that I'm not sure anyone fully understands. That unfortunately hasn't stopped GMO advocates from accusing opponents of GM foods of causing massive deaths and childhood blindness by blocking the rollout of that first version.

(In)effectiveness of rice needs to be proven on it's own merits

I looked it up and this was the first result

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c911/5ad056fc1bb4f257fa6109...

http://www.goldenrice.org/PDFs/Dubock-The_present_status_of_...

> "In conclusion, each of the studies discussed regarding the effectiveness of golden rice concluded that it was indeed effective at providing vitamin A. "

Stone and Glover are saying that the current studies which prove Vitamin A are effective aren't comprehensive enough. However as far as I can tell all the research so far points to golden rice being effective.

Stone and Glover later wrote: "IRRI’s own assessment that the rice may augment the already successful nutrition and breastfeeding programs, at least in some ‘‘difficult to reach’’ areas, is plausible."

Sound like they are critical of it for many reasons but accept it working as a possibility.

https://pages.wustl.edu/files/pages/imce/stone/stone_glover_...

The studies concluded that it was effective at providing vitamin A as part of a well-balanced diet that wasn't overly reliant on rice. The controversy is over its effectiveness in severely malnourished kids whose diet is mostly rice, since there's reason to believe its effectiveness - and indeed that of supplementation in general - in providing vitamin A ia heavily dependant on the quality of the rest of the diet.

To put it bluntly, proponents of golden rice have been arguing that it's worthwhile because it's just not realistic for poor families to include vegetables in their diets because of expense and logistical difficulties, whilst pointing to a study in which the participants were fed meat (amongst other ingredients) along with their golden rice to prove it works.

IIRC its effectiveness was connected to the availability of fat in the rest of the diet, without which vitamin A was not metabolized effectively.

Then wouldn't the most effective help for these people be a shipment of butter and multivitamins?

A single shipment is not very effective at anything. They need structural access to better food.

Vitamin A deficiency is also effectively combated by low cost supplements (which is why groups like the WHO focus on this as well as dietary solutions)[1]. Though people who talk about golden rice claim that they're very concerned about vitamin A deficiency, it's telling that they never talk about other much more successful efforts that have had great effect in combating this deficiency (this article is no exception). It seems like a lot of people have put reason aside and become enamored with the idea of a technological silver bullet.

Also worth pointing out that the problems with making golden rice viable have little to do with anti-GMO activists, and more with the problems in creating a viable product[2].

[1] https://data.unicef.org/topic/nutrition/vitamin-a-deficiency... [2] https://source.wustl.edu/2016/06/genetically-modified-golden...

I can imagine the group of malnourished children, ready for controlled scientific testing (meaning knowingly not giving this rice to some kids while giving it to others) is not large and so we have to do for now with the evidence that it works in normally nourished children.

There are apparently plenty of children not receiving it at all. Just start providing it to some, and observe the difference.

Sorry, very inadequate treatment of this story. Golden rice is intellectual property, whose seeds are no longer owned by the farmer who grows them, but by whoever is selling it.

Think about it, can the root of the problem be the nutritional value of rice, when no rich country needs to license a foreign company's intellectual property to feed itself?

If that's true, this is the real problem.

Is there legal precedent for this? I can't imagine that there were cases in the pre-GMO world where seed suppliers claimed that they owned all of the seeds grown by a farmer, but I could be wrong.

Would love to see some direct sources -- licensing docs from the vendors, legal cases, that sort of thing (e.g., not a link to a news article).

Plants have been patentable in the US since 1930: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_Patent_Act_of_1930

I strongly suspect, but have no verified numbers to prove, that the majority of currently-patented plants are not GMO cultivars.

Even with GM crops there are still ongoing legal battles on their patentability, e.g. on cotton seeds between Monsanto and Indian farmers:

https://www.downtoearth.org.in/blog/agriculture/was-there-a-...

I mean this discussion of IP from the Golden Rice Project's website is ridiculous! [1] How can this page of legalese compare to having a the seeds in your barn?

[1] http://www.goldenrice.org/Content2-How/how9_IP.php

From the first paragraph of that article:

"The Golden Rice Humanitarian Board [has] the right to sublicense breeding institutions in developing countries free of charge."

From later in the article:

> This contribution was based on the understanding that Syngenta would retain commercial exclusivity for the technology, including large agricultural setups in developing countries.

The sub licensing agreement has several hooks to ensure that.

Free of charge is not freedom. If I were a farmer, or a nation of farmers, I would want the source code.

Not that I like it but to be fair you don't get the genome of any seed you buy.

Most farmers already buy their seeds from somewhere anyway even if their non GMO

Most of the seeds you buy are hybrids that don't breed true if you reuse the seed.

Sometimes, that doesn't matter much - I've saved corn seed and replanted it year after year, and it may not be exactly Silver Queen or Seneca Horizon anymore, but it's still corn. But some things get weird.

I'm interested to know what weirdness you've run into.

Mostly I've seen odd results trying to replant seed from cucumbers, squash, pumpkins, that variety of thing, when they are hybrid varieties. A lot of times, there's a clear regression back to the base varieties that were hybridized, and it can be quite a striking difference.

Also, a number of these cultivars can cross-pollinate, and then you can get some really interesting monstrosities. For instance pumpkins getting crossed up with buttercup squash that come out as dark green and orange tiger-striped things.

That sounds really cool! Even if they might not be edible.

An enormous amount of plants are already IP (under PVR) so I don't really understand your point.

Are they F1 sterile?

If not, then I would encourage developing countries to just igonore the IP rights and/or in the case that they are sterile to develop a generic.

The license requires the country to decide whether it allows planting golden rice. So I wouldn't be surprised the owner of the patents tried to use that to extract money from the countries directly when they fail to enforce it.

Usually international agreements take precedence over local laws. I don't think there would be any problem to enforce it.

In theory yes. In Africa... not so much. [1]

[1] https://mg.co.za/article/2015-06-18-how-zuma-and-ministers-p...

Africa doesn't rely so much on international agreements as much as corporate paramilitary and colonial military forces to enforce foreign interests.

Part of the concept of sovereignty is that you can just ignore agreements and no one can enforce them.

Well, if there's no technical way to enforce the agreement, then the agreement doesn't really exist. But if there's a way to enforce it, another part of sovereignty is that you can complain only to who wants to hear.

The definitions of a sovereign country is that it's government/ people decides what goes.

They can definitely suspend IP protections for indefinite period.

That works when you're a rich and powerful country, but not so much when more powerful countries are willing to inflict economic sanctions on you for disrespecting the IP of their corporations.

IP is not enshrined in a UN charter and is not a human right. There is no reason to believe every country should respect it.

Using it as a cause to impose sanctions would be highly illegal.

Combined with the blowback you'd get for imposing sanctions on Somalia for trying to feed kids, I don't think it's a realistic possibility.

Any sovereign government has the right to nullify patents on its territory in times of emergency, or in the interests of national security. Doing so to feed starving kids would not even be controversial.

UK has such provisions in its laws, and so does India. I am less informed about Africa

This is definitely a navigable issue. The GM rice should succeed or fail on it's own merits, and if usefull, the IP could be sorted.

Bad article in my opinion. Millions of lives were lost because of malnourishment, not because of golden rice as intellectual property was rejected. From a production perspective the food could easily be provided in any other form, there just isn't enough incentive.

Yes. This is blame shifting in its purest form.

> From a production perspective the food could easily be provided in any other form

But it wasn't. The counterfactual isn't "other vitamin-A rich foods being provided", it's "nothing being provided".

Reads like it came straight from the PR dept

Perhaps, but one of the most important things about biology and medicine is that there is often a cheaper, lower tech solution to the problem you are trying to address. Often, chasing tech and trying to deploy it for humanitarian purposes works poorly. Look at how long it takes billionaires to understand that mosquito netting makes more sense than mosquito lasers.

While I happen to agree with the conclusion the headline is utter bullshit. While a block on GM rice may have contributed to the problem it's dangerous (and intellectually dishonest) to suggest that it's a cause. It's also worth pointing out that Golden Rice was available in some of these countries and the locals just didn't want to touch it.

Citation for golden rice being available but local not wanting to eat it?

No citation but I recall reading years ago about it being made available in countries where rice isn't normally consumed. Not all that surprising it didn't catch on.

This WUSTL anthropologist doesn't agree.

https://source.wustl.edu/2016/06/genetically-modified-golden...

They made similar promises about GMO cotton shit that got lot of Indian farmers killed!

Google BT Cotton!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bt_cotton#Controversies

Wasn't that debunked? The claim was that it contributed to suicide, but the farmer suicide rates have, by numbers I've seen, declined over the relevant period, which would not be surprising since cotton productivity has skyrocketed.

Now, maybe the numbers are doctored, and I'd believe that about India, but I'd want some proof other than "Google it and trust the first negative story written from WhatsApp rumours.".

https://www.bloombergquint.com/global-economics/as-a-genetic...

I do not consider Bloomberg to be fountain of truth! It has its biases but .. here you go!

Isn't the problem there the application of improper, illegal pesticides? The story linked for the 45 deaths from poisoning directly states that the pesticides involved were siezed by the state.

Then later in the article:

> He, however, pointed out that the failure of this technology is unique to India. None of the 14 other Bt cotton-growing countries have faced the problem because they follow pest management strategies such as short-season crop, pheromone-based monitoring and so on.

It seems from even your source: no deaths were the result of either variant of Bt Cotton, and India's failure to maintain the crops is directly linked to shortsighted mismanagement of crops, and possibly unique conditions in India.

I'm no great fan of Monsanto, but it doesn't seem like there's a case of killer cotton here, but instead a predictable tragedy of routine human foolishness.

Lots of controversy on the topic, and I don't know where the truth lies. The following article offers an analysis of the Indian suicide case and makes a reasonable case a myth has been created:

https://issues.org/keith/

Pesticides are currently a leading method used in suicide deaths world wide.

No self poisoning is safe, but some pesticides could be made safer. Glyphosate is somewhat less harmful than a bunch of other pesticides, but the formulations of glyphosate tend to add other more dangerous chemicals.

Suicide is a complex phenomena, and reducing it down to "GMO kills farmers" misses that complexity, especially in places like India.

(I'm in a car to the beach at the moment but I'll try to edit in some links later)

https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/notes/2006/np24/en/

I think anthropologists - who have no special expertise in biology or nutrition - have been responsible for a lot of the FUD around GM which OP was trying to illustrate.

The patents on golden rice should begin to expire next year. Not only will farmers be able to propagate it without running afoul of IP restrictions, but hobbyist gene hackers will be able to create new varieties.

I don’t understand why you need to engineer vitamins into rice instead of just handing out vitamins separately? And if its that easy to save lives with vitamins the implication is these vitamins have been deliberately withheld to shift this product (which isnt whats happened only that the gist of the article makes no sense when you look at the premise)

Because handing out vitamins costs money for each dose, and with GM rice you only need some seed (pun intended) investment and then people, even the poorest ones can grow it by themselves - it is two orders of magnitude cheaper. Also: handouts would make those people dependent on their benefactors moods,being able to grow healthy spiecies of rice solves the problem permanently.

GM rice would also make sustenance farmers dependent on handouts, since they're not allowed to keep and re-plant seeds, but compelled to buy new seeds from the rights holders every season.

The free license for golden rice allows saving and replanting seed - thankfully big biotech wasn't quite that obviously evil in their big positive PR for GMOs act. The caveats are that doesn't cover imports and exports (all consumption must be within the country that grows it), and it only covers subsistence farmers and low-income food-deficit countries according to the FAO. As a general rule, food-deficit countries aren't going to be able to grow enough rice to supply the country because the definition literally requires they can't grow enough calories of food to feed their population. I'm not sure what hapens when a country loses its LIFD status or a farmer has a good year and makes over the threshold to grow it in other countries, but I presume it's not good for anyone except the company owning the patent rights.

Then the problem to solve is the rights & IP. If farmers are allowed to re-plant seeds and future financial liabilities are removed, then GM becomes a great way of solving a lot of problems.

Perhaps GM technology for farming should be considered a large scale problem best solved by public entities, with developments being open source & public domain.

If there is a patenting process someone might contest we can just set a timer for five years after acceptance and wait for the patent trolls to roll all over starving people. GM crops are great, but not as long as we can't guarantee this won't happen with a change to the system as a whole.

Why would a patent troll sue a rice farmer with no money in a developing country?

Is the patent troll going to sue in Somalian court, or does he expect the guy to show up for court in US?

I can't wait to see the proceedings.

Same reason Monsanto sues farmers in India. Protecting IP.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-seeds-of-suicide-how-monsa...

It looks to me that the GM lobby is trying out a new strategy to promote GM crops, and this time it is "think of the children".

It's not new. The story was alway: "We need GMO to eliminate starvation around the world".

But somehow people are still starving and the industry is making more money. Why feed the hungry if you can make more profit selling GMO to those who already pay?

We already produce enough food per capita world-wide for everyone on the planet to be morbidly obese. The problems are in distribution; they're political and logistical. That won't change until the people (both in the West and in nations with widespread food insufficiency) in charge start doing some things differently that people with wealth and power seldom decide to do on their own.

Its the same argument for weak encryption. Its always about the children.

One of the unfortunate things about the GM foods debate is how rarely the details of a particular crop are considered. What method was used to engineer it? What gene was added in or modified? What is the IP approach used by the inventor? What are the results of field trials? For all the strong opinions I’ve seen, nobody mentions these specifics. It’s like deciding someone is guilty or innocent of a crime when all you know is that they’ve been charged.

Golden rice is mostly a publicity stunt. Basic agrarian reforms could easily allow farmers to grow crops that naturally contain vitamin A. This article perpetuates a very expensive misconception about land use, R&D and the basic problems of nutrition.

If only we could use GM crops without handing control of the food supply to hostile corporations. It's only the irrational fear of GM that is strong enough to stand up to their lobbying - with the unfortunate side-effect of stopping all GM crops as well. But without that fear, the same misaligned incentives that result in tractor DRM and novel-length EULAs will be written into the DNA of the plants we need to live, while competitive forces will bankrupt those that stick with traditional seeds.

This. I'm all for the science, but don't trust corporations further 'n I can throw them.

You can trust corporations to do what they are designed to do, and nothing more.

Not always that. Because people.

The alternative is the government, right?

How is government ownership of food patents worse than corporate ownership of them?

It’s not worse. But is it better?

I can think of several instances where the federal govt gave sweet-fuck-all about human rights or what’s best for society.

It should be. Governments are supposed to represent the people and be accountable to them. Corporations are far too often only accountable to their shareholders. Reality is often different, of course.

Government decisions are made democratically, by the people or officers appointed by them, to do what they believe is best for the people.

Corporate decisions are made autocratically, by the owners or their appointed officers, to do what they believe makes the most money.

How is the former not categorically better than the latter?

In theory they are better, but in practice “what makes them the most money” is often “what is best for the people” and governments and elected officials are often inept or corrupt. This doesn’t apply for every government or corporation on every issue, so we need to be nuanced in who we entrust which issues to. Specifically we want to look at the severity of the issue, the incentives, and the corruption and the competence of the government in question.

Because once people are democratically elected or appointed, they no longer are beholden to the people. Once in power, they are free to do whatever they want, which history shows, tends to be pretty self-serving.

I wasn't saying it was. Merely observing that the government isn't a popular alternative either. Note that this isn't even my valuation--anti-corporatists tend to very strongly dislike both corporations and (the U.S.) government. Of course no political movement is entirely homogenous, so there are probably people who distrust corporations but love the government.

I definitely wouldn't say that government is always trustworthy, but having the food supply controlled by a democratically operated nonprofit entity with a clear interest in everyone's wellbeing is obviously better than having the food supply controlled by a single for-profit entity with no stake in the wellbeing of employees or customers except insomuch as it provides profit for its owners.

Also it should be noted, "government ownership of patents" means that the patents are unenforcable. The government is forbidden by law from charging licensing fees for its IP, so government ownership of patents is inherently open-sourcing them.

While Monsanto owns the patents, they can legally wreck anyone who attempts to violate them. If the government owns the patents, "violation" doesn't exist because anyone can use them freely.

> I definitely wouldn't say that government is always trustworthy, but having the food supply controlled by a democratically operated nonprofit entity with a clear interest in everyone's wellbeing is obviously better than having the food supply controlled by a single for-profit entity with no stake in the wellbeing of employees or customers except insomuch as it provides profit for its owners.

I don't think this argument is very convincing. For example, why limit the application of this rationale to food supply? Why trust the market (i.e., corporations) with _anything_. Is our government strictly superior to the market in all cases, or does the market have some strengths that the government lacks? If so, why are those strengths the wrong tradeoff for this case in particular but perhaps not for others? Without more nuance, this argument could support socialism (as in "the government completely owns production", not the capitalism-friendly democratic socialism).

Another issue is that we're not talking about complete ownership of the food supply, but only temporary ownership (i.e., patents have a lifetime) over individual food products that are individually subject to competition and regulation.

> While Monsanto owns the patents, they can legally wreck anyone who attempts to violate them. If the government owns the patents, "violation" doesn't exist because anyone can use them freely.

Patent enforcement is a feature, not a bug. We want people to invest in making food production more sustainable, so we need incentives. Notably, patents _do_ expire, so Monsato's (or whomever) risk is rewarded and society benefits. If the enforcement is too strict or the patents too long, we can adjust those knobs accordingly. No need smash the system because the knobs aren't tuned properly.

This is true if we make all sorts of ideal case assumptions. Patents should expire but don't always do due to all sorts of shenanigans between corporations and govt. In the end I prefer corporations innovating in "optional" items like iphones, tvs and hamburgers. We however need to take a communal interest in the essential stuff. I mean, a lot of damage could be done to societies before patents expire.

> Patents should expire but don't always do due to all sorts of shenanigans between corporations and govt.

I'm not familiar with this. Genuinely didn't know it was an issue.

> We however need to take a communal interest in the essential stuff.

Yeah, I'm 100% on board so far.

> I mean, a lot of damage could be done to societies before patents expire.

This is where you lose me. What's the threat model? Monsanto releases a food product that is so good that they capture the entire food market in some way that anti-trust regulators aren't able to regulate and then jack up the price, all before the patent expires? Presumably yours isn't a food safety concern because you're advocating for lowering the bar to GMO technology. This sentence sounds like FUD; help me understand why I'm mistaken.

You are correct in that my concerns are not primarily food safety although still a concern. I am more interested in food security. When whole countries are in the thrall of companies like Bayer/Monsanto because their farmers have become dependent on these companies' seeds partly due to 'well-meaning' initiatives like golden rice can feed millions, thats where i say 'hol up'

Absent patent rights, none of that would matter. Patents are grotesque rent seeking and responsible for all these ills.

Patents are very important for wealth creation. Investors need returns on their investment, otherwise they will not make investments in the research and development necessary to develop the product.

Without the limited time monopoly created by patents, investment cannot be recuperated and there will be no funds available for creating and productizing innovation.

Yet golden rice was made mostly through state funding - patents aren't the only way.

One of the slightly unfortunate things about golden rice (and there are quite a lot of them) is that the state funding it was developed with required them to patent it and sell the patent to the private sector. Though not patenting it would've been of limited help due to the thicket of patents covering the technologies they used.

Why were they required to patent it and sell the patent?

I think the organization funding it (which if I recall correctly was the EU) wanted the university research they were funding to turn into commercial products, and so set a blanket rule requring patenting and attempts at commercial licensing. This is a fairly common view on government-funded research these days unfortunately. There was a published report by the main researcher somewhere with more details.

Well, that was a stupid idea, then. Instead of selling the patents of public research to private monopolies, they should have made them available to everybody.

developed and then sold to a private rent seeking party, don't forget that detail.

There is nothing stopping them from doing the same for other uses. Yet, they don’t.

There are plenty of industries where people invest without a government granted monopoly. If they don't want to invest without this, maybe they shouldn't.

Meanwhile I am under the impression that public funding works better for these sorts of things anyway. So they will pay in their taxes and it will serve the public good.

I wonder if something like the Kickstarter model could be applied to this sort of research.

Novel investment models and the increased accessibility of bioengineering technologies to individuals have the potential to revolutionize the field in the future.

Witness the blossoming fields of biohacking and citizen science.

The fruits of individual, independent experimentation and development may get out in to the wild, if they haven't already, and no patent is likely to stop them.

The fear is not inherently irrational either. Its clearly a very powerful field on the confoundingly complicated biological domain, and with more power and complexity comes greater potential for serious error. It can be fair to disagree about the safety and wisdom of various GM applications, but the charge that it is all irrational is really just divisive rhetoric.

I don't approve of novel GM in agriculture, I encourage naturalistic development for mass production in the environment and especially the materials we routinely put into our body. Poor nutrition is caused by poor politics, culture and economics over and above all of the existing foods which are already available to solve it.

I think GM will best be limited to acute medical challenges and containable research and emergency uses, until we have actually developed a strong command of diseases and natural (evolved) systems. Our agriculture should be as contingent as possible with natural history and existing species in our already very disturbed sphere of ecology.

That's true - while I mostly don't buy the 'frankenfood' scare, I worry about the dangers to the ecosystem. For example a GM crop that is fungus/insect resistant, but the resistance is due to a herbicide/pesticide it was engineered to synthesize, that is later found to harm some key species (the way neonicotinoids were found to harm bees). Only recalling it will be much more difficult, especially if the genes spread to other species (such as by horizontal gene transfer). All the while the corporation selling the crop has every incentive to try to hide the ill effects.

I question why doesn't some amoeba just maximize its fitness and so turn into effectively a bioweapon that eats all the mammals on the planet? It has some sort of intelligence that restrains it from wiping out its food source? I do wish for Genetic Science and all relevant fields to take that mystery very seriously and solve it securely before its confident to mass replicate novel species in the huge system. Species which have evolved somehow over ages to not be routinely in massive flux between champion species. The microbial world could liquidate swathes of the phylogenetic tree repeatedly, if all it needs is a chance mutation to create a new alpha species. What stops an experimental GMO containing such an over-competitive mutation, or a precursor to such?

There is so much yet not known or controllable in microbiology, it does worry me that the prevailing attitude is so confident with the little that is known and doable. Its alarmist and uncertain, but so is the foresight that significantly increasing ghgs through the whole atmosphere is too dangerous, or filling the sea with more plastic waste than there are fish left in it is not worth the price and risks. Hopefuly culture is on the verge of accepting these concerns have had rational basis. It needn't result in the end of modernity, but in the appreciation and protection of some older things.

> Why doesn't some amoeba just maximize its fitness and so turn into effectively a bioweapon that eats all the mammals on the planet?

Evolution takes a long time. It's not totally unfair to describe humans as that amoeba, now approaching the nightmare scenario of consuming almost everything on earth.

One aspect is the speed of evolution - as one species evolves, its competitors evolve just as much, making it difficult to dominate too much. This is a limitation that GM does not share - it can make genetic leaps in a few years that would be vanishingly unlikely to occur naturally, or would take millions of years. Other species could not keep up.

To illustrate with the previous example, insects evolve resistance to the chemical countermeasures that plants evolve. But give those countermeasures a GM kick, and insects won't be able to keep up. I'm sure eventually they would evolve something, but there could still be a huge crash in their population before that happens.

Part of the answer is that mammals are three to seven orders of magnitude larger than amoeba. That comes with some advantages! Immune systems are super complicated, and can leverage the resources of a vast cooperating superorganism of cells.

That sort of thing has happened before though. Oxygen was originally a pollutant that caused the extinction of most species on the planet. This is sometimes called the Oxygen Holocaust (more commonly, the Great Oxidation Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event).

Its not a great answer because despite superior size and having immune systems, microbial life is still routinely deadly, just not too often so deadly to cause extinctions. I have read microbiologists puzzles over for example, what mechanisms 'evolves' strains of flu viruses between periods of relative dormancy and deadly flare up.

That oxidation event represents one major collapse on an ancient scale, but did not owe to a species over-predating others, which Im considering here as a more pervasive risk for species 'dynamics' than pollution/poisoning.

I find no firm answer to these concerns. We dont know that species genetic information has not evolved to avoid over-competitiveness, configurations that could be broken by non-evolved modifications, mass reproductions and releases into the system. Its not a matter which can be settled by current insights, so its somewhat plausibly disguarded as fear and uncertainty. But it might even be the case that what genetics may naturally evolve are naturally confined to modest competitiveness by a property of the yet mysterious steps which enable life to evolve - because we don't even know in what circumstance life evolves. Plenty of theories but no one has ever observed life assembling and evolving from lifelessness, or even modelled a viable sequence illustrating it, and not from lacking of trying for the great achievement and accolades that would bring. Its such an amazing scientific subject, the developed science is amazing too but not nearly so much as its subject matter - biological complexity and remaining mysteries. Its worth treating with special care and humility of some kind.

The fact that we can’t explain the exact steps from stones to microorganisms is no reason to start showing “humility” to intelligent design - agnostic respect to that idea on an equal footing to all others is more than sufficient.

The prospect of intelligent creators is irrelevant here as if they are present they are unseen. What can be partially made out is the broad path of evolution which has actually somehow arrived by its own properties on intelligence in animals - and also appearances of intelligent/cooperative etc. relationships between species. Many different kinds of relationships over kinds of chemistry and activity are present, which themselves may evolve and may have evolved over and throughout species.

The presumptive outlook is that all of the simple and complex evolutionary processes are in sum and product - assuredly mundane, stochastic, resilient to any accidental discord which could be caused by humans bodging their evolved configurations and then non-competitively reproducing trillions of carriers and spreading and maintaining them across the globe with no means to ever recall the version. That's GM agriculture described 'on an equal footing' with the products of natural history.

Humans have been genetically modifying their food since the beginning of agriculture. Fear based on the particular modification technique used is completely irrational.

That is silly. Imagine that the genes were transferred via some toxic mould that transfers DNA but that was extremely hard to remove after the procedure. Of course the procedure matters

So a virus?

You mean, like transferring the proteins that cause brazil nut allergy into soy? Fortunately, they caught that before it was rolled out.

Humans have also been traveling since forever, yet the precautions for flying a jet plane are vastly different than if you're going on foot.

Yet still you are much more likely to end up dead or injured walking or driving any distance that would cause a normal person to fly there.

As Boeing has shown that only stays true as long as nobody games the regulations against flying death traps. Planes are safe because we require them to be safe, not because tin cans traveling miles above ground are inherently safe. I will take my chances on foot over a 737 MAX with its suicidal MCAS.

This is a bad argument. Local vs global optimisation. Same as comparing natural reactors and nuclear weapons.

I’ve been reading a sci fi book called the windup girl. The setting is a future where agri-tech companies and bioweapons proliferated until some conflict happened that led to almost all crops on earth being wiped out, and only innovative new produce could survive the engineered diseases, so the agri-tech companies have incredible power since the world depends on them for its survival.

I would like to think it’s unlikely to really happen, but I’ve read news in the last 2 years about the USA researching tech that could lead one day to these types of scenarios[1]. There was also agent orange etc in Vietnam, showing a willingness to use such tech even in less serious wars (eg, compared to ones that endanger your cities).

[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181009102511.h...

That's also roughly the backstory of Niander Wallace in Blade Runner 2049. He creates synthetic farming methods to avert a global famine, which then gives him the clout to get the ban on replicants overturned. Windup Girl came out in 2009, perhaps some inspiration was acquired for BR2049...

Does raise the question is how Wallace manged not to just get his methods expropriated by the government or other Zaibatsus.

Cyber Punk Dystopias are not big on Due Legal process, quite big on extra judicial solutions :-)

That reminds me of the time Monsanto bought Blackwater.

(It's unclear to me whether they actually did, though I do remember it being reported. Online, reports are all over the place, with Monsanto denying it, others claiming it's true, and some sources claiming Monsanto merely hired Blackwater or bought only the intelligence arm of Blackwater under a different name. But it seems likely there's some relationship at least.)

With the newer DNA editing tools becoming available more widely, perhaps there can be a "Free and Open Source Genetics" movement that will curtail the power of corporations to control genetic modification.

There's lots of GM crops in use already, they aren't being stopped.

It's not just corn and soy either:

https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/fdcc/?set=Biocon

The Federal Government could purchase the patents for GM crops after they've been developed and proven to be safe. Then make the crop freely available.

You'd probably want some kind of purchase agreement where the crop developer gets annual payments based on how much the crop is used over a period of time.

Personally I think the idea of applying IP rights to living things is perverse and despicable.

Of course the real cause of these millions of deaths and cases of child blindness is not so much the block on GM rice, but the extreme poverty in which these people live so that they have no access to better food than rice.

The GM rice is a stop-gap measure in the absence of improving actual living conditions. It's sad that it's being blocked, but it's not the true cause.

Whether or not the benefits of "golden rice" are overstated, I'd really like to see a DIY implementation of that experiment.

Sometimes I see "CRISPR workshops" which go over the basic theory and walk through performing individual steps like amplifying DNA with PCR and preparing it for transfection, but it's still very difficult to actually get a stable targeted mutation.

And having a goal like beta carotene would be a good opportunity to explain how to research the pathway which leads to a certain chemical, and get a plant to express each step along the way.

I get that people are suspicious of GMOs, but I'd actually like to see a simple gene lab in every home. It takes time to perform this sort of experiment, and if the work could be spread out among individuals who all have their own interests/tastes/climates/etc, we might see more progress in the practicum.

Sadly, synthetic biology is hard, and the equipment would probably take more space than a toaster or a blender. But it's a nice pipe dream.

I love that idea - AgriHack, a plant hackathon to create a new strain of rice that provides vitamin supplements. The winner has the most vitamins and uses the least water to grow.

How close are we to this kind of thing?

The average price of Vitamin A is $54/kg: https://www.pharmacompass.com/price/vitamin-a . The RDA for kids is around 0.5 mg, 20,000 kids could be supplemented a day with $54.

100g of GR1 rice is needed to feed one kid, So 2000 kg rice need would provide the same amount of beta-carotine/Vitamin A. Just for Vitamin A point-of-view, I fail to see how is it financially reasonable to choose GR1 over lab-quality Vitamin A for $54 per kg.

But does it assimilate as well?

You mean whether it is biologically available? I guess, the synthesis has been out there since the 1940s, and other procedures has been found in the 1970s: https://community.dur.ac.uk/i.r.baxendale/papers/Tet2016.72.... Because these procedures are still in use, my hunch is that they are in use in vain.

This is a promo piece for Ed Regis' new book, right? Doesn't matter what the science is, as long as we buy the book in the end.

<wit> If you study hunger, you find that the root causes tend to be uncontrollable forces of nature like greed, corruption, and politics. Not that we _can't solve problems like this with frankenrice, but it may be more straightforward to help those who find themselves oppressed into poverty, be slightly less oppressed. </wit>

If it works, the poorer Indian states have wheat as their staple. What could help those hundreds of millions?

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2012_Poverty_distrib...

https://scroll.in/article/670473/rice-and-wheat-maps-of-indi...

Naive Question: Wouldn't a multivitamin be a cheaper and safer solution to counter a broad range of vitamin deficiencies?

If not, why would growing crops be a cheaper solution? What is the opportunity cost of growing golden rice to feed your vitamin deficient family vs. growing something else to sell on a broader market?

Or just enriching the rice

These countries are riddled with corruption at all levels. Any enriching agent would be taken by the person tasked with enrichment and sold, the poor would get nothing and suffer the deficiences. This way the color tells the tale. Greenpeace, Bryce and all his cronies need to be tossed into a pit full of mambas. Audit Greenpeace very throughly, remove their deductions and track the officers and strip all the other lairs of these crooks

Yeah, this is the reason why I don’t donate even a cent to charities that ‘claims’ to help Africans and North Koreans.

I’d rather give a dollar to the local homeless shelter and watch them burn fuel with it at night, than my cent going straight to corrupt governments and militias.

It's easier to piggyback on an existing behavior (keep on eating rice, but use this different kind of rice) than creating a new behavior (eat this vitamin pill).

On the consumer side, one can explain that the new golden rice is better and keeps your family healthier than regular rice. It's simple enough to be understood by people with low levels of education that the yellow one is better, and can easily be communicated to other members of the family who may not be able to read. There might be issues with counterfeit rice (dyed yellow instead of being actual golden rice), but that would be a separate problem.

In the cases where new behaviors are wanted, it helps to root them in culturally specific ways. For example, for iron supplementation, one way to increase the amount of iron consumed is to use a few drops of acid (such as citrus juice) combined with an iron ingot. This was done to alleviate iron deficiency in South East Asia.

Obviously, this was a very foreign behavior with low compliance, until they reshaped the ingots to be fish shaped, leading to the "lucky iron fish." Explaining to people that if they cook with the lucky fish in their pot, the fish will bring them good luck and health. This has led to much better compliance and outcomes.

Also see iodine supplementation, enriched flour, fortified milk.

Also, the "lucky fish" made of iron which, when placed into a cooking pot, prevents iron deficiency in millions of children.

This is literally explained by the parent comment.

Is it...?

Supposedly the cause of the big reduction in metaly deficient children in the USA over the last 70 years or so.

The vitamins in multivitamins have to come from somewhere. It's much cheaper & easier to engineer an organism to provide these vitamins all in one go, rather than having a whole suite of plants and animals that produce these different things.

Not necessarily. The level of nutrients found in food varies considerably, even in the same food from season to season and batch to batch.

Many of the vitamins and minerals are cheaper to produce at high quality with industrial production, such as ascorbic acid (around $12/kg - https://www.foodbusinessnews.net/articles/10836-vitamin-c-pr...). The dosage can be more precise in this way.

Also with diabetes and certain other illness, some nutrients can't be taken at a required level from natural sources due the amount of other nutrients, e.g. carbohydrates.

Vitamin A supplements are a cheap and effective solution, and one that groups like the WHO have focused on[1]. They almost never come up when golden rice is discussed, because discussions of golden rice seem to be more about pushing on particular kind of tech than about discussing the best way to solve the problem.

[1] https://data.unicef.org/topic/nutrition/vitamin-a-deficiency...

If you think "safer", watch this case study of a kid who consumed enough gummy vitamins to get Hypervitaminosis A:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZ6nREONy_4

Making vitamins taste like candy increases compliance (good), but you can overdose on fat-soluble vitamins like A (bad). "Just take a pill" is not a great solution.

Or just make them taste like taking a pill which isn't supposed to be chewed or overconsumed. I never said anything about making vitamins taste good, nor do I think outliers like the case study discussed in the video are relevant to the general population, especially when the situation discussed in the video is a "fish out of water" scenario and not something relevant to a 3rd world resident living in the 3rd world where the native languages are being used.

Also, since when do we need "compliance" with regard to offering a cheap solution to a common problem that isn't infectious? People are intelligent enough to know what they should do. Let them have the free will to take the solution or not. We don't need to force or seek "compliance". That just sounds kind of dystopian or authoritarian.

Talk is cheap, and so is saving some lives. Are you part of the solution? Please help if you can...

[1] Feed My Starving Children

[1] https://www.fmsc.org/

> “In Bangladesh, China, India and elsewhere in Asia, many children subsist on a few bowls of rice a day and almost nothing else. For them, a daily supply of Golden Rice could now bring the gift of life and sight,” states Regis in his book, Golden Rice, which is published this month.

This made me think of one of the scariest papers I’ve seen: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

> In summary, we have shown that elevated [CO2] has the potential to cause damage to human nutrition and health via leaf vegetables and feed crops, not only grain crops. The greatest threat comes from the more severe drop in N and Zn in polished rice grains, and the lower content of Ca in feed crops and leaf vegetables. In addition, a reduction in the intake of minor minerals such as Mn and S that we currently obtain in sufficient amounts might cause unanticipated health risks. Flow analysis and transcriptomics suggested that lower absorption and/or translocation of elements is a key factor underlying the lower elemental content in rice grains, and the lower expression of related transporter genes under elevated [CO2] might also play a role.

> Our results suggest that increasing [CO2] levels might have more serious consequences than previous influential predictions that were based on brown rice [1]. In particular, the drop in N in polished rice would negatively affect the nutritional status of the 153 million individuals of Bangladesh, who depend largely on rice for their protein intake and are already estimated to have an individual daily protein intake below the standard of “hungry” as defined by FAO/WHO (S1 Table).

> Our results showed that elevated [CO2] might also impair human nutrition via leaf vegetables and feed crops that we either eat directly or utilize as animal feed, not only via grain crops. As compared to the grain, elemental content declined markedly in the plant body of rice. For example, Mg and Mn content in the plant body decreased 2- and 4-fold, respectively (Fig 1C). These data, and the difference between polished (endosperm) and brown (endosperm plus bran) grains demonstrate that the elemental reduction due to elevated [CO2], is specific to each organ. The impact on leaf vegetables and feed crops should also be noted, because these are important sources of micronutrients despite being consumed in smaller amounts than staple grains.

In the analysis of feed crops, which combined our new data including rice straw with data from three previous studies (see Fig 1D, Table 1), elevated [CO2] decreased the content of five major (S, K, P, Ca, and Mg) and three minor (Zn, Fe, and Mn) essential minerals by 8.3% to 21.9%. It is especially noteworthy that the content of Ca was reduced by 12.7%. At present, much of the world’s population is facing a deficiency of Ca [21, 22]. Approximately 25.4 million adults in the United Kingdom and the United States have a high risk of Ca deficiency [21], and 54% of the population of Africa (5.7 hundred million individuals) is at risk of Ca deficiency [22]. Leaf vegetables are an important source of essential minerals; for example, in the United Kingdom and the United States, 10% of Ca and Mg intake comes from leaf vegetables [7]. The main source of Ca is milk, however, with UK adults obtaining half of their Ca intake from milk and dairy products [7]. The elemental content of the livestock's ingested feed correlates with that of the milk that they produce [23, 24]; therefore, the lower elemental content of feed crops grown under elevated [CO2] is likely to reduce the elemental content of milk and dairy products. Ultimately, elevated [CO2] might affect human nutrition and health even in high-income countries, where food supplements for micronutrients including Ca are readily available.

Very insightful, thank you

Looks like another attempt to evangelize GM crops by using this time the "think of the children" argument.

when western people had iodine deficiency because of their diet, they added iodine in salt, not modifying wheat DNA to contain seaweed's DNA so that it contains iodine.

this article is a solution in search of a problem.

Did anyone ask whether the market in any of these countries would accept golden rice? They generally like white rice. I didn't see any reference to a market study in the article.

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