Word: potrykus
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...imagining a golden rice was one thing, Potrykus found, and bringing one into existence quite another. Year after year, he and his colleagues ran into unexpected obstacles, beginning with the finicky growing habits of the rice they had transplanted to a greenhouse near the foothills of the Swiss Alps. And when success finally came in early 1999, Potrykus, 65 and about to retire as a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, faced even more formidable challenges. The golden rice that he and his colleagues developed is a product of genetic engineering, what opponents call Frankenfood...
...about a year now?ever since Potrykus and his chief collaborator, Peter Beyer of the University of Freiburg in Germany, announced their achievement?their golden grain has illuminated an increasingly polarized public debate over genetically engineered crops. Last month Potrykus and Beyer arrived in the Philippines carrying golden rice seeds and genetic material bound for the International Research for Rice Institute, IRRI for short. The goal of IRRI scientists will be to develop a golden tropical rice, based on the techniques Potrykus has used for his temperate rice variety. And this is only the first step. Two private companies?Swiss...
...late 1980s, after he ?became a full professor of plant science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Ingo Potrykus started to think about using genetic engineering to improve the nutritional qualities of rice. Of some 3 billion people who depend on rice as their major staple, around 10% risk some degree of vitamin-A deficiency and the health problems that result. The problem interested Potrykus for a number of reasons. For starters, he was attracted by the scientific challenge of transferring not just a single gene, as many had already done, but a group of genes that represented...
...Around 1990, Potrykus hooked up with Gary Toenniessen, director of food security for the Rockefeller Foundation. Toenniessen had identified the lack of beta-carotene in polished rice grains as an appropriate target for gene scientists like Potrykus to tackle because it lay beyond the ability of traditional plant breeding to address. For while rice, like other green plants, contains light-trapping beta-carotene in its external tissues, it does not produce beta-carotene in its endosperm (the starchy interior part of the rice grain that most people...
...Rockefeller-sponsored meeting, Potrykus met the University of Freiburg's Peter Beyer, an expert on the beta-carotene pathway in daffodils. They decided to combine their expertise. In 1993, with some $100,000 in seed money from the Rockefeller Foundation, Potrykus and Beyer launched what turned into a seven-year, $2.6 million project, backed by the Swiss government and the European Union. "I was in a privileged situation," reflects Potrykus, "because I was able to operate without industrial support. Only in that situation can you think of giving away your work for free...