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July 29, 2010
· Inside the hothouses of industry
· Safe food concerns Americans
· Cap-and-trade program outlined
· EU clears six types of GM maze
· Saving America’s mother vine
Inside the hothouses of industry
(Nature.com)
– Do Not Water, says the small notice by the pots of withered, brown maize
seedlings, the genetically unlucky ones in an experiment testing maize's
tolerance to drought. Five minutes after stepping into the huge greenhouse in
which these plants are attempting to grow at the research headquarters of
Monsanto in
These green plants and the scientists that produced them are unusual in ways not visible to the eye. They are Monsanto's entry in a race to make the first transgenic, drought-tolerant maize (corn) that is commercially available to farmers. The race is tight. But after more than 20 years of research and development (R&D), Monsanto says it is now two years away from launching the seeds onto the market. And within the next few years, the company and its major competitors hope to bring to market other transgenic crops, resistant to stresses such as soils starved of nitrogen, phosphorus and other essential nutrients.
In pursuing these crops, Monsanto and the other giants of
agricultural biotechnology are making a significant departure from what until
now has been a mainstay of their business: developing and selling pesticide- or
herbicide-resistance crops, such as Monsanto's Bt
maize. When these plants were first introduced in the 1990s they produced
dramatic increases in yield for farmers — and a windfall in profits for the
companies supplying the seed. But the yields have peaked, and so have the
profits. Now the next big commercial gains lie in crops that can withstand
water- and nutrient-deficient soils.
Crops that can beat these stresses are also a vital part of
the solution to the global food crisis. If the 9 billion people expected to
inhabit the world by 2050 are to be fed, then farms in low-income countries
must grow more food, sustainably, on water- and nutrient-poor soils (see page
546). Researchers and policy-makers realize that they can't meet the
food-security challenge without the private sector, which makes up a
significant share of the global agricultural research effort (see 'Public vs private'). Monsanto's annual research budget alone is
US$1.2 billion, just topping the
Getting together
So in their demand for hardier crops, the commercial aims of the biotechnology companies and the requirements of the developing world have aligned — and companies such as Monsanto hope to fulfil them. In June 2008, Monsanto pledged to double yields in its core crops of maize, soya bean and cotton by 2030 over 2000 levels. In September of the same year, Monsanto's chairman promised to "improve the lives of an additional 5 million resource-poor farmers", in large part by making some of its seed technology available to increase their productivity. Other companies have made similar pledges.
All this leads to another reason why the green, transgenic
seedlings in the stifling
Slow progress
It will take more than buffing to overcome critics' deep scepticism about commercial biotechnology. Genetically
modified (GM) crops, they say, have so far done little for the developing
world. Earlier humanitarian initiatives have yet to reach fruition. Golden
rice, for example — transgenic rice designed to combat vitamin A malnutrition —
has been in development since 1990 (see page 561). Critics ask what has taken
so long; they worry that industry's grasp on intellectual property is holding
up research progress; they question why these supposedly transformative
transgenic technologies have yet to put food in the hungriest bellies. "I
don't think the private sector is doing enough," says Achim
Dobermann, deputy director general for research at CGIAR's International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in
Roger Beachy, director of the US
Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture in
Which is why I'm here, slowly wilting in Monsanto's greenhouse, and why I travelled to two other giants in the sector — Pioneer Hi-Bred in neighbouring Iowa, and the UK research headquarters of Swiss company Syngenta — to tour their labs, greenhouses and test fields, where the next generation of crops are sprouting. I wanted to see them and talk to senior researchers and executives about the future of their science, their business — and, inextricably, the future of the planet's food.
I sit in the small waiting room of Monsanto's main building, A, with its single bench and friendly security guard. Buildings B through to Z are scattered around the manicured gardens and endless car parks that make up the rest of its headquarters. Monsanto employs around 5,000 scientists and technical assistants worldwide and splits its R&D budget equally between biotechnology and traditional plant breeding. (Monsanto, like the other companies I visited, does not break down how much of the budget is spent on its humanitarian projects.)
For its GM crop work, Monsanto's scientists screen hundreds or even thousands of genes from plants, bacteria and other organisms for ones that might endow plants with a desired trait. The drought-tolerant B. subtilis gene, cspB, that they found helps bacteria deal with environmental stress such as cold temperature. When inserted into maize plants it helps them cope with drought by disentangling RNA, which folds up abnormally when the plant is water-starved. The theory is that the energy the plant would have spent fixing drought-entangled RNA can now be sunk into grain.
Away from the sweltering greenhouses, posters provide a
regular reminder of Monsanto's 'pledge' to the world in six different languages.
The company promises dialogue, transparency, respect, sharing and benefits. And
Bob Reiter, vice-president for breeding technologies at Monsanto, is up front
about the company's business-minded approach to its humanitarian work. Crops
that will make the company money in the short term, in richer countries, could
also eventually make money in lower income ones. "The initial approach is
to help the subsistence farmer get on his feet," he says. "There has
to be a humanitarian element to it. But you have to think about what a viable
agricultural industry in
Long-term plan
It is with these sentiments that Monsanto entered into its public–private partnership with the African Agricultural Technology Foundation. It is not giving away the green strain that I saw thriving in the greenhouses. It is giving away the resources it used to make it — such as the sequence of the cspB gene, plus information about other drought-tolerant genes and traits that the researchers are introducing into maize through traditional breeding. Crops developed through the partnership will be made available royalty free to subsistence farmers. If a country moves from subsistence farming to commercial farming then, in theory, the company could start charging for the seed.
But first Monsanto has to get its 'first generation'
drought-tolerant maize into fields in the developed world. The company has
finished testing the seed; now it has to secure regulatory approval from US
federal agencies and scale up seed manufacture. Researchers at Monsanto are
already working on 'second generation' crops — the details of which the company
is keeping close to its chest — that can grow in a wider range of environments
across the
Mechanized engineering
One state north of Missouri, on the outskirts of the small midwestern town of Johnston, Iowa, the last few rows of houses suddenly drop away and a sea of young green maize rolls up to the horizon. In patches the maize has turned yellow and its growth is stunted. Recent intense rainstorms have flooded parts of the fields, washing nutrients from the soil that are vital to the crop's healthy growth, including nitrogen fertilizers.
Pioneer Hi-Bred, part of the chemical giant DuPont, saw an opportunity here to increase its customers' yields. When global nitrogen fertilizer prices peaked in 2008 at more than $450 a tonne, nearly double the previous year's cost, the company ramped up a research project that it had begun in 2005 to develop maize hybrids that produce the same yield on less fertilizer.
Pioneer isn't quite the biotech behemoth that Monsanto is: in 2009 DuPont spent $734 million on its agriculture and nutrition R&D, which includes Pioneer Hi-Bred's work on seeds and crop protection. The company has now mechanized much of the process of linking the genes inserted into plants to desired traits. A robot hauls maize plants off conveyor belts; another takes digital images to rapidly assess how novel genes have changed the plants' growth.
In Pioneer's case, researchers hit on one possible gene in the red alga Porphyra perforata, which can grow in environments with nitrogen levels 100 times lower than maize. The gene codes for the enzyme nitrate reductase, which converts nitrate into nitrite. "We don't really know how it works," says Dale Loussaert, a senior scientist working on the project, of the algal gene. Even so, he says, "the plant models in the lab look promising. The yields look good." The company does not expect to have a product on the market for another 10–12 years though.
Pioneer has agreed to donate the transgenic technologies,
molecular markers and other resources associated with its nitrogen-use project
to a public–private partnership. The Improved Maize for African Soils (IMAS)
project was launched in February 2010. It is led by the International Maize and
Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT) in
Pioneer is also involved in a project to increase the
nutritional content of sorghum, a crop that is a staple food for hundreds of
millions of people throughout Africa and
Florence Wambugu, founder and chief executive of African Harvest, used to sit on a science advisory panel for DuPont, and so knew that the company was developing technologies that would be useful to African Harvest's sorghum project. She approached the company for help. "It is not just the technology donation; this won't amount to a product. We had to get outside expertise to help manage the money and people, and ensure we are meeting milestones," she says. Marc Albertsen, a senior research fellow at Pioneer Hi-Bred and co-principal investigator on the sorghum project, says that tests in June showed that transgenic sorghum varieties developed by Pioneer produced 80% less phytate but 20% more iron and 30% more zinc than conventional varieties.
Such results are not going to assuage the critics. Gregory Graff, an agricultural economist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, says that the majority of companies' R&D spending and effort still goes towards blockbuster crops with traits, such as pest control, that benefit agribusiness, leaving neglected many crops that are important in the developing world. "They bring out one or two examples of public good research, such as drought-resistant varieties and golden rice, but research on these has been going on for a very long time and none are actually ready yet," he says.
Graff says that the lack of progress is in large part a consequence of the hold that the private sector has on intellectual-property rights to crucial technology, such as genetic markers, and the sequences of key genes and 'promoters' that drive gene expression. Dobermann, of the IRRI, agrees that access to intellectual property is a problem. His institution would like to experiment with traits to improve the drought tolerance of plants and their efficiency in using nitrogen, but there are "so many restrictions" on the use of patented technology that researchers at his institute concluded "it was not worth getting into," he says. "We either have to reinvent the technology ourselves or use a second-class solution," he says.
John Bedbrook, vice-president of agricultural biotechnology at DuPont, agrees that "tensions" over access to intellectual property exist, but says the company has to remain "dispassionate". Without intellectual property, he says, companies would have little incentive to invest in the research to begin with. But, he adds, companies could be "more open source with enabling technologies" such as promoters. Reiter says that restrictions on access to intellectual property are often misconceived. When public researchers ask the company for access to patented technology, he says, it often turns out that the subject of their research was not actually covered by a patent. All this leaves a question: what has really been holding up these projects?
The real delays
This was the issue that I discussed at Syngenta, whose
modern
Not true, says Ingo Potrykus, chairman of the Golden Rice Humanitarian Board and, as an academic researcher, one of the inventors of golden rice. He says that the team initially thought that they had to obtain free licences for 70 patents protecting technologies used in the rice development. But when Syngenta joined the project, its lawyers found that only a handful of these patents applied to the countries where golden rice was targeted. So in fact, he says, intellectual property has not been a major problem. "Without the cooperation of the private sector we would probably never have been able to solve the intellectual-property mess and the project would have ended at this stage," says Potrykus.
Mike Bushell, Syngenta's chief scientist, says complex technology and regulations are the real hold-ups for transgenic crops. "R&D takes around 10 years and then you have to go through the regulatory stage," he says. Bushell says critics overlook how long it takes to develop crop varieties with complex traits such as drought tolerance, which involve many genes and are greatly influenced by environmental conditions. And passing regulatory hurdles involves reams of tests showing, for example, that a gene is stably and safely expressed.
As we stroll past Syngenta's
'monsoon machine', which recreates harsh weather conditions, the discussion
turns to the volatile topic of GM crops and their regulation. In 2004–05, the
company moved the bulk of its GM research out of Europe and to the
Nicholas Kalaitzandonakes, an agricultural economist at the University of Missouri-Columbia who tracks the agricultural biotech industry, says that the industry is making a substantial investment in these public–private partnerships. "I have the impression that people in the industry know they can't make money on [these products] in developing countries but they honestly want to make it available. But they also want to watch their backs." If something goes wrong — for example the research fails, the partnership breaks down, or a transgene contaminates local commercial supplies — a company could face heavy financial liability and public relations fall-out, Kalaitzandonakes says. "It's not a simple thing to manage risk and potential risk."
This cautiousness is partly why only a handful of these partnerships exist. Yet Kalaitzandonakes is optimistic that once one product comes on the market — be it golden rice, a drought-tolerant maize or a biofortified sorghum — then businesses, governments and the public will become more confident in backing the next. The optimism is tangible at Syngenta too. Earlier this year the company started a project with the CIMMYT to research and develop more productive wheat varieties for farmers in the developing world. Bushell says that the company has learnt a lot from its involvement in helping to develop golden rice.
Outside, fields of winter wheat are bordered by an unruly metre-wide strip of wild grasses and flowers designed to
attract bees and other pollinating insects. This farming practice, which
Syngenta is hoping to encourage across
Safe food concerns Americans
(npr) – Government officials
have said for years that the
Recalls of tainted lettuce, ground beef laced with dangerous E. coli 0157:H7 strain, and the giant oil spill in the Gulf, have dented the public's perception of food safety.
According to a national survey conducted for NPR by Thomson Reuters and released today, 61 percent are concerned about contamination of the food supply. Most of them — 51 percent — worry most about meat.
That doesn't stop us from consuming about 63 pounds of beef per person per year, mind you. But meat safety is a big concern compared with the 25 percent of people who worry most about seafood and the 23 percent who fret most about produce. Dairy got a pretty low 4 percent response.
Thomson Reuters says the margin for error on the results is plus or minus 1.8 percent.
More than a third of the 3,000 survey respondents said their
fear of seafood contamination has increased over the last three months —
roughly the same amount of time the oil has been spilling into the
But not everyone agrees on what to do to fix the problems.
In our Thomson Reuters survey, more people said food companies should improve their quality control systems, rather than calling for more inspections, oversight or stiffer penalties.
Consumers
The group asked 1,000 people whether Congress should pass a law to give the Food and Drug Administration the power to force food companies to recall tainted products. It's one of the key provisions in a bipartisan food safety bill that passed the House last year but is languishing in the Senate.
Eighty percent said yes.
The FDA, which is responsible for most of the food supply, has come under fire in recent months for failing to address gaps in the food safety system.
"The number of people killed annually by something they
ate is roughly the same as the number of Americans who've been killed in
But a lot more people get sick from eating something bad — 78 million a year, including 325,000 hospitalizations, says CDC.
Ten percent of the people in our survey said they got sick from something they ate in the last six months, and more than a quarter of them sought medical care.
The Produce Safety Project at
Cap-and-trade program outlined
(Los
Angeles Times) –
The Western Climate Initiative, if it survives political hurdles, would be three times larger than an existing trading system for power plants in 10 Eastern states. It would cover not just the electricity sector, but most large industrial plants as well as transportation.
Such state efforts are moving to the forefront just as national legislation to curb global warming pollution has stalled in Congress.
However, implementation of the initiative by each state or
province is by no means assured. A measure on
California GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman has said she would delay AB 32 by a year if elected.
Under a cap-and-trade system, industries would purchase allowances for the tons of carbon dioxide they emit. Factories that cut emissions below their designated caps could sell excess allowances to other companies or bank their allowances for future use — thus cutting their costs.
The goal is to reduce carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping
emissions that scientists say are causing dangerous disruptions in the world's
climate. State officials project that rising sea levels and melting snowcaps as
the climate warms will have a dramatic effect in
Eventually, the California-led initiative could link to the
Eastern trading system and a proposed Midwestern pact. Together, they could
provide a foundation for a future federal cap-and-trade program if political
obstacles in
As the nation's most populous state and the world's
eighth-largest economy,
The Western initiative would cut emissions 15% below 2005 levels. It would transition the region to "a green economy that will reduce our dependency on oil, increase our energy security and create jobs and investment now," Schwarzenegger said in a statement.
The trading program would allow companies to meet targets by purchasing less expensive "offsets" from forests, agriculture or garbage dumps when companies in those sectors store carbon dioxide beyond what they would have emitted in the normal course of business.
The Western Climate Initiative was launched in 2007 with
seven
EU clears six types of GM maze
(AFP via Yahoo! Finance) RUSSELS – European regulators authorised on Wednesday the import of six types of genetically-modified maize for use in animal feed after governments were deadlocked over whether to ban or approve them.
The European Union has been divided for years over genetically-modified foods and the European Commission has proposed new rules aiming to break an impasse that has severely limited the cultivation of such crops.
Agriculture ministers meeting last month in
Under European Union rules, the decision was passed on to the European Commission, which gave the six maize types the green light because they were scientifically sound, a commission spokesman said.
Two weeks ago, the EU's executive arm proposed new rules that would give individual EU states the ultimate power to ban or grow genetically-modified crops.
"One of the reasons that the commission came up with its proposals a few weeks ago to change the whole system was to get past the deadlock," Roger Waite, a commission spokesman for agriculture, told a news briefing.
"The hope is that the new rules that will apply will get past this problem about member states that like GMOs (genetically-modified organisms) and those that don't like GMOs," Waite said.
The authorisations for the maize that won approval for animal feed on Wednesday are valid for 10 years. One of them, Syngenta's Bt11 maize, was up for renewal while the five others were new authorisations.
Saving America
(Los Angeles Times) – It began as a fleck of brown on a leaf. Then several leaves curled and died. Soon the sickness spread.
The Mother Vine, believed to be the nation's oldest cultivated grapevine, was in distress. Planted about 400 years ago, most likely by Croatan Indians or Sir Walter Raleigh's settlers, the vine has survived hurricanes, nor'easters and suburbanization.
Now it had been brought low by that scourge of modernity,
chemical weedkiller. A power company contractor removing brush from power poles
in late May had accidentally sprayed the most famous planting along
Jack Wilson, an 84-year-old retiree, tried to save the
Mother Vine. He's been tending the plant since 1957, when he and his wife built
a home on land where it grows at the edge of Roanoke Island, a few paces from
The Mother Vine emerges from the sandy earth here above Roanoke Sound in several thick clusters of tough, woody roots. Its rambling green canopy — 32 feet wide and 120 feet long — is supported by an elaborate set of posts and arbors, some carved decades ago from locust trees.
Plant experts rushed in from the North Carolina Department
of Agriculture. A viticulture specialist from
The power company, Dominion Virginia Power, was aghast. It did not care to be remembered as the corporate giant that killed the Mother Vine.
"When I was told a 400-year-old grape vine had been sprayed with herbicide, well, it wasn't exactly what I wanted to hear," said Chuck Penn, a Dominion spokesman. "We were distraught. You're talking about an historical icon."
Dominion accepted responsibility right away. "We were ready to face the music," Penn said.
The company placed a hasty call to Lloyd Hipkins, a Virginia Tech weed scientist, who at that moment happened to be teaching a class of Dominion "commercial applicators." Those would be the very contractors who spray and hack vegetation near power lines.
Hipkins drove straight to Manteo and prescribed a treatment: prune, water and fertilize.
"It looks like hell," Hipkins said of the vine's damaged section, "but the injury to the plant was really localized."
All the out-of-town experts pruned more of the vine. They dosed it with fast-release fertilizer. They thinned the dense canopy to let in more light. And they watered.
For the next few weeks, Jack Wilson continued to nurture the plant. He watered the roots and coaxed along new green shoots. He didn't want to lose the Mother Vine on his watch, not after 53 years.
Last week, Wilson and his wife, Estelle, 80, crouched low under the sturdy wooden arbor that supports the vine's canopy. They got a good look at the gnarled roots, some thick as steel cables. They saw fresh shoots and new tendrils tumbling down.
"I think she's going to make it," Jack said.
"I'm sure of it," Estelle said.
Their son, who has helped nurse the vine through the crisis, surveyed its canopy and pronounced the Mother Vine on the mend.
"If she's made it 350 years, or 400 years, I think if we keep taking care of her, she'll survive," John said. "She's a tough old bird."
Sara E. Spayd, the
Her prognosis?
"It's a very large plant," Spayd said. "It should recover and do well."
That assessment came as a great relief to Rodney Blevins, a
Dominion Power vice president who visited the
"We are deeply sorry for any harm that has been done to the Mother Vine," Blevins said. "It's an important cultural icon, not just locally but for the entire country."
He said the company is working with its contractors to ensure they "don't allow this to happen again."
For more than half a century, Jack Wilson has lovingly pruned the Mother Vine to keep it from taking over his yard. It covered two acres when he arrived in 1957, but it has been trimmed back to about half an acre.
The Mother Vine produces sweet scuppernong grapes, a variety
of muscadine. "In all the
world the like abundance is not to be found," two of Sir Walter Raleigh's
explorers wrote from
Thousands of cuttings have been taken from the vine, John
Wilson said, helping sustain
Jack Wilson said he's been eating the amber grapes since he was a boy listening to tales of the vine from his grandfather, who was born in 1872. He gives away loads of grapes to townspeople and tourists who stop by to gaze at the famous vine. In bountiful summers, the amber grapes hang in clusters from the canopy.
"It's a landmark from my childhood, and something that
needed to be protected,"
One reminder of the Mother Vine's near-death experience is a
shriveled black tendril on a telephone pole at the front corner of
"Dad didn't sleep very well that first month," his son said. "He's sleeping better now."
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