Today more than 100 million
children around the world eat diets that lack sufficient vitamin A. Vitamin
A deficiency can cause a number of serious aliments up to and including
blindness. The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich recently
introduced a possible solution — it developed a genetically modified
strain of rice that makes the rice rich in beta-carotene. According to
a report in Science, breeding lines for the rice are currently being established
and the Swiss Federal Institute will make the sees available for free
to farmers in developing countries.
According to Professor Ingo
Potrykus, the vitamin A enriched rice may only be the beginning. “When
we started this project, and throughout the progress of this project,
the scientific community was convinced that it could not work because
nobody previously had been able to engineer a complete biochemical pathway,”
Dr. Potrykus told the BBC. “We are already starting to do the same with
wheat. We are close to doing the same with cassava. … We will probably
also introduce it to barley. … We have initiated collaborations to put
the same genes into banana and sweet potato. The number of important core
plants which don’t have enough or any provitamin A can be engineered now
to achieve the same.”
Potrykus and his colleagues
don’t plan on stopping at simply correcting vitamin A deficiency. They
have managed to insert a gene into rice to make it more rich in iron.
This, unfortunately, doesn’t have the same possibilities as the vitamin
A advance because a chemical in rice neutralizes the body’s ability to
absorb the extra iron during digestion, but it could be applied other
plants that don’t have this problem. Increasing the iron content in diets
is extremely important in developing countries, where up to 20 percent
of women suffer from anemia which contributes to a number of health problems.
Any improvements in rice are
extremely important to the half of the world’s population which relies
on rice as a main staple food. Almost everyone in East and Southeast Asia
depends a great deal on rice as a major source of calories. Improving
the nutritional value of rice could help solve a number of lingering health
problems in the developing world.
References:
Yellow rice gives dietary boost. The BBC, January 14, 2000.
Biotech rice could solve major nutrition problem, scientists say. The
Associated Press, January 14, 2000.