09 Jul 2014 The long journey of biofortified foods
Somewhere in Iowa, volunteers are earning $900 apiece by providing blood samples after eating bits of a banana kissed with a curious tinge of orange. It’s the first human trial of a banana that’s been genetically engineered to contain higher levels of beta carotene, the nutrient that our body converts into vitamin A.
Researchers want to confirm that eating the fruit does, in fact, lead to higher vitamin A levels in the volunteers’ blood. The volunteers in Iowa may not realize it, but they’re playing a small part in a story that spans the globe.
James Dale, a researcher at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, led the scientific effort to create these bananas, with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The researchers inserted the new genes at their laboratory in Brisbane, grew the trees at a field station on the northeastern coast of Australia, then harvested the fruit, froze them and flew them to Iowa. Because they are genetically modified, the bananas required special permits from the US Department of Agriculture to enter the country.
These are cooking bananas, common in Africa, typically eaten steamed or fried. And that’s where the bananas ultimately are headed, if all goes well. They’re intended for Uganda, where bananas are a staple food and many people suffer from vitamin A deficiency.
Yet if the experience of similar “biofortified” crops is any guide, this banana faces a path strewn with obstacles and uncertainty.
More than a decade ago, for instance, researchers created a kind of “golden rice” with high levels of beta carotene — and immediately found themselves in the middle of controversy. In the Philippines, anti-biotech activists a test plot of the genetically engineered grain. When researchers carried out a feeding trial of golden rice in China, using children as subjects, it turned into a national scandal. The researchers were for not disclosing, in all cases, the fact that the new rice was genetically engineered. No government has approved widespread cultivation of golden rice….
NPR.org: Read the full article
Caption: Ugandan researcher Stephen Buah and Professor James Dale hold bananas bred to be rich in vitamin A at Queensland University of Technology.
Additional reading:
Biofortified food slow onto tables
In 1992, a pair of scientists had a brainwave: how about inserting genes into rice that would boost its vitamin A content? By doing so, tens of millions of poor people who depend on rice as a staple could get a vital nutrient, potentially averting hundreds of thousands of cases of blindness each year.
The idea for what came to be called golden rice – named for its bright yellow hue – was proclaimed as a defining moment for genetically modified (GM) food. Backers said the initiative ushered in an era when GM crops would start to help the poor and malnourished, rather than benefit only farmers and biotech firms.
“It’s a humanitarian project,” Ingo Potrykus, a professor emeritus at Switzerland’s Federal Institute of Technology, one of the co-inventors of golden rice, said.
Yet the rice is still a long way from appearing in food bowls – 2016 has become the latest date sketched for commercialisation, provided the novel product gets the go-ahead. With $30 million (R323m) invested in it so far, the odyssey speaks of the technical, regulatory and commercial hurdles that have beset the “biofortified food” dream…..