Abstract
The Arrested Development of Golden Rice: The Scientific and Social Challenges of A Transgenic Biofortified Crop
Highlights
On July 31, 2000 Time Magazine‘s front cover pictured plant scientist Ingo Potrykus, a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in a field with his new strain of rice with the headline ―This rice could save a million kids a year‖ (Nash, Zurich Monday, & Potrykus, 2000 July)
The key questions are: what do existing peer-reviewed journal articles state about effectiveness and efficacy of Golden Rice (GR)?; what obstacles has the GR project met?; what arguments are made by skeptics of GR?; and what implications does the GR project, as a humanitarian aid, have for transgenic crop development overall? We shall begin with a review of the current trends of vitamin A deficiency (VAD) and coping strategies
In places where green vegetables with an ample supply of micronutrients that can be turned into vitamin A were unavailable to local inhabitants due to crop seasonality (Harjes et al, 2008), expense and low bioavailability of green leafy plant carotenoids (Boileau, 1999), the use of a staple and relatively abundant crop to provide the sources of vitamin A was the goal behind Golden Rice
Summary
The study, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2012, concluded that β-carotene in GE rice was as effective as pure β-carotene in oil and better than that in spinach at providing vitamin A to children (Tang et al, 2012). The authors failed to provide sufficient evidence that the study had been approved by a local ethics committee in China in a manner fully consistent with National Institutes of Health guidelines. They failed to substantiate the full consent of parents of the children involved in the study through documentary evidence. The key questions are: what do existing peer-reviewed journal articles state about effectiveness and efficacy of GR?; what obstacles has the GR project met?; what arguments are made by skeptics of GR?; and what implications does the GR project, as a humanitarian aid, have for transgenic crop development overall? We shall begin with a review of the current trends of VAD and coping strategies
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