From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Tue Jul 23 2002 - 19:19:50 MDT
On Tue, 23 Jul 2002, Harvey Newstrom wrote:
> Yes, it seems that like many big corporations, the developers of golden
> rice have exaggerated their results.
I think any exaggeration may be due to the press and not the scientists.
> They paid to develop it and say they didn't get what they
> were promised.
I doubt they were promised much. Any serious scientist knows that
balancing metabolic pathways is tricky. In their first attempt the
found that they didn't need one of the genes they added at all.
See:
J. Nutr 2002 Mar 132(3):506S-10S
Beyer P, et al.
Golden Rice: Introducing the beta-Carotene Biosynthesis Pathway
into Rice Endosperm by Genetic Engineering to Defeat Vitamin A
Deficiency.
(Look in PubMed if you want the abstract).
> Dr. Shiva insists that it was a research product only,
> and that it is in no way near ready for distribution to the world.
Perhaps not. But there have to be some fraction of people who are
getting 90+% of their Vitamin A requirements from other sources who
would benifit from the extra ~8% provided by Golden Rice.
Really though, this isn't a difficult problem. Use the same
procedures to get ~5 strains with the genes in different chromosome
locations, cross them all to get a much higher production of
the necessary enzymes. That should solve the problem unless there
is a precursor substrate problem that needs to be resolved.
Robert
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