Biotechnology is being starved of the opportunity to show its real worth, according to WA scientists gathered at an address by the Swiss developer of golden rice, Professor Ingo Potrykus, during 10^th anniversary celebrations at the Murdoch University-based Western Australian State Agricultural Biotechnology Centre (SABC).

Professor Potrykus developed golden rice as a humanitarian project to deliver vitamin A to people in developing countries, where rice is the staple diet. Vitamin A deficiency is believed to be responsible for 3000 deaths per day and 500,000 cases of infant blindness per year. “Although the necessary biotechnologies were discovered in the 1980s and golden rice was finalised by 1999, the crop has still not made it to farmers in developing nations that need it because of regulatory obstacles based on undue paranoia. “The cost in human life resulting from the prevention of its use far exceeds any hypothetical or imagined risks associated with genetically modified organisms (GMOs),” Professor Potrykus told the assembled scientists. “Regulators are unable to cope with the concept of a new variety in which a metabolic pathway has been deliberately added, and so they have prevented even controlled planting of small scale field plots to generate enough seed for further testing,” Professor Potrykus said.
	(left to right) SABC Chairman, Hendy Cowan of Narembeen and Director, Professor Mike Jones meet with golden rice developer, Professor Ingo Potrykus before his presentation at the SABC’s 10th anniversary celebrations at Murdoch University.

SABC Director, Professor Mike Jones said over-regulation also stymied the technology in Australia where local research has yielded tremendous advances in crop development only to be shelved because the release of GMOs was not feasible in the current political climate.

“SABC based company, Grain Biotech Australia, for example, is developing salt tolerant wheat varieties which could open up one million hectares of saline WA land to profitable crop production,” Professor Jones explained.

“That could have tremendous social ramifications in rural Western Australia by returning industry to marginal areas and bolstering WA’s wheat harvest by more than 25 per cent. The new wheat promises to remove salt from the soil to help ameliorate salinity, while delivering a profit to growers.”

Professor Jones said that while most of the biotechnological research conducted at the SABC was not transgenic, it was this field that delivered the novel results and made otherwise impossible advances viable, as was the case overseas with Professor Potrykus’ golden rice.

An expert panel of biochemists assembled by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1991 had rated the chances of developing golden rice (containing provitamin A) at less than 0.5 per cent, but nonetheless supported the project for its humanitarian potential.

Professor Potrykus adopted transgenic technologies because provitamin A was not present in any of the 80,000 known rice accessions, and so the pathway for its production had to be introduced into rice. Within nine years, he and his team had developed rice plants of which 200 grams per day is believed sufficient to deliver the necessary vitamin A requirements of people in developing nations.

Regulation must be scaled back to reasonable scientific levels to help recognise the potential of such GM crops, according to Professor Potrykus, who said everyone knew the regulations were wrong, but were afraid to say so for fear of criticism.

“Should those who oppose GM technologies for political advantage or self-interest be held responsible for the unnecessary suffering of millions of people with vitamin A deficiency who would benefit from golden rice?”

Although efforts were underway to augment golden rice with higher iron and protein levels, Professor Potrykus had been told that there was no chance of regulators clearing such a crop for release. The global death toll due to dietary deficiencies of vitamin A, magnesium, protein and iron is 24,000 per day or 8.76 million per year.