The evolution of golden rice. Click image for a larger version. Courtesy Golden Rice Humanitarian Board.

As a Prius-driving, Peet's Coffee drinking supporter of public television, I almost always reflexively gave to Greenpeace when they asked. Not anymore.

I am not opposed to most of what they stand for. I want them to keep pushing to fight global warming, save the oceans, etc. Where I disagree with them is on genetically modified foods. And in particular, I disagree with them on golden rice.

Golden rice is an example where a scientist wanted to do some good. A huge problem in the developing world is vitamin A deficiency. The numbers I have seen for this deficiency are truly horrifying. One report I read stated that it is responsible for 1-2 million deaths and over 500,000 cases of irreversible blindness per year.

This deficiency tends to affect people who get most of their calories from rice because rice doesn’t make vitamin A or anything that can be converted into vitamin A. Well, actually that isn’t strictly true. The rice plant does make provitamin A in its leaves, just not in the part we eat.

So Dr. Ingo Portykus decided to create a strain of rice that would make provitamin A in the rice kernel. Since there isn’t any easy way to breed this into rice or to turn the necessary genes on in the rice kernel, he decided to add a couple of genes instead.

The first plant he engineered didn’t make a lot of provitamin A but with a couple of tweaks here and there, researchers managed to make an orangish rice capable of providing a good portion of someone’s vitamin A. Thus golden rice was born. And with it, a whole lot of controversy.

The current controversy has centered on the unknown health effects of this rice and on the danger of the added genes getting out into nature. These are the same sorts of things that are brought up about any genetically modified (GM) foods.

My thoughts on the matter are that each GM food should be looked at individually with respect to risks and benefits. For each one we should ask, “Do the benefits outweigh the risks?”

This is going to be different for each GM crop. For example, planting of Round Up ready crops requires no tilling of the soil which conserves the soil and protects its fauna. (Yield is also often improved.) But these crops require a lot of the herbicide Round Up to be sprayed onto crops and if the added gene gets loose, it will make weeds Round Up resistant.

It is an open question about whether the risks outweigh the benefits with these GM crops. Frankly I lean towards planting them because the benefits to the soil outweigh the risks of Round Up but I understand the opposing side’s point of view. Not so with golden rice.

If golden rice can do what is promised, the effects on people’s lives will be enormous. When fully implemented, half a million people might not lose their sight. In other words, it would be like saving every person in Oakland from going blind. Each year.

And golden rice could save 1-2 million people from dying. That is like keeping every person in San Jose and San Francisco from dying. Again, each year.

So the benefits are obvious. And odds are that people would get them too. Early studies have shown that people can get sufficient vitamin A from around 3.5 ounces or 100 grams of golden rice per day.

The risks are hazier. Adding the genes could have created some subtle change in the biochemistry of the rice kernel that will prove harmful. This doesn’t seem very likely especially since the plant already makes provitamin A in the leaves. There is also no evidence that anything like this has happened.

Still, it is formally possible. But does this very low risk outweigh the potential benefits?

The two genes they added could escape into nature but this is extremely unlikely with rice. I am told that rice plants are self pollinating and that the pollen is very short lived. Makes sense to me given the thousands of varieties planted all over the world.

Even if they did get out, they would only become a problem if there was some sort of advantage to a plant having these two genes. What this advantage might be isn’t clear. This is unlike making a weed Round Up ready which might be a real advantage.

So the risks are minor and the potential benefits huge. But is there another way to get these folks vitamin A? Yes but none of them have worked particularly well to date.

For example, if these folks could eat a more varied diet, they wouldn’t suffer from vitamin A deficiency. Same thing if we could get more of them vitamin A supplements.

These might be the solutions in a perfect world. However, as the nightly news and even Greenpeace’s website shows, we do not live in a perfect world.

Golden rice seems to me to be the best way right now to save hundreds of thousands of people their sight and millions their very lives each year. Once Greenpeace gets behind golden rice or supplies sufficient funding for alternative methods of getting people the vitamin A they need, I will start supporting them again.

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The AP ran a story the other day about people working with DNA in their garages (or apartments). For example, a woman in San Francisco is trying to engineer yogurt bacteria that will glow green in the presence of melamine. This is the chemical that was found in baby formula and pet food from China.

The idea would be that you (or some governmental agency) could check your yogurt with a UV light before you ate it. If it glowed green, then the yogurt was contaminated with melamine.

These glowing bacteria could help a lot of people avoid melamine poisoning (as long as people could get past the fact that they'd be eating a GMO!). But do we really want people doing this kind of biology at home?

Of course this sort of thing would be very difficult to stop. People can go to science fair project sites and get all the information they need to jury rig a lot of the equipment to do these kinds of experiments. They can also search the web or take a class at their local community college and learn most everything they need to know.

In fact, the technology to do this kind of stuff is so straightforward that we do something similar here at The Tech. We let visitors put a gene in bacteria that causes the bacteria to glow green only in the presence of a special sugar called arabinose.

So unless we put up massive resources to shut down these labs (a "War on Amateur Labs"), people are going to be able to do this stuff if they want to. To me, the two big questions are:

• Will anything useful come out of these labs?
• Will something dangerous be released onto an unsuspecting public?

Odds are that nothing too useful will come out of these labs. Sure the melamine bacterium could be useful (it is actually very similar to the outlawed glowing goldfish designed to detect pollutants in the water). But it would be very hard to bring to market. Two potential problems are getting people to eat a GMO and proving to the FDA that it is safe.

One good thing that might come out of this sort of thing is to make biology more accessible and maybe more exciting too. People might think of and do projects for fun that, as a necessary part of accomplishing their goal, will increase their understanding of molecular biology. In other words, they might be more willing to learn this stuff for something fun they thought of.

I can imagine some dangers too. What if someone decides to come up with an anthrax vaccine and makes a dangerous bug that gets loose? Or who knows what else?

There probably isn't a big risk in something like this happening but biology is different than coming up with a new computer program or light bulb in your garage. Biology uses live things that can make copies of themselves and spread pretty far pretty quickly. Traditional labs have controls in place to keep these sorts of things from happening. These unregulated labs may or may not be that careful.

A group in Boston that promotes do-it-yourself biology:

http://diybio.org/

How to make some molecular biology lab equipment at home http://www.scq.ubc.ca/the-macgyver-project-genomic-dna-extraction-and-gel-electrophoresis-experiments-using-everyday-materials/

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