It would be cheap to grow and indefinitely sustainable, because low-income farmers could save the seeds from any given harvest and plant them the following season, without purchasing them anew.īut in the 20 years since it was created, Golden Rice has not been made available to those for whom it was intended. The superfood thus seemed to have everything going for it: It would be the basis for a sea change in public health among the world’s poorest people. For them, a daily supply of Golden Rice could bring the gift of life and sight. In Bangladesh, China, India, and elsewhere in Asia, many children subsist on a few bowls of rice a day and almost nothing else.
#The true story of fman part 10 plus#
Lack of vitamin A is responsible for a million deaths annually, most of them children, plus an additional 500,000 cases of blindness. But it is a life-and-death matter for people in developing countries. Vitamin A deficiency is practically unknown in the Western world, where people take multivitamins or get sufficient micronutrients from ordinary foods, fortified cereals, and the like. Golden Rice: The Imperiled Birth of a GMO Superfood, Ed Regis, Johns Hopkins University Press, 256 pp., $29.95, October 2019 This small change made Golden Rice into a miracle of nutrition: The rice could combat vitamin A deficiency in areas of the world where the condition is endemic and could, thereby, “save a million kids a year.” Golden Rice also carries the substance in the part of the plant that people eat. Conventional rice plants already contained beta carotene, but only in their leaves and stems, not in the kernels. The “gold” was in fact beta carotene, a substance that is converted into vitamin A in the human body. This was Golden Rice, the fruit of nine years of research, experimentation, and development. When spread out on a black surface, they looked like nothing so much as tiny yellow gemstones. Instead, they had a distinct golden hue, the color of daffodils. Their kernels were not the usual plain white grains of rice.
The rice plants around him, although the joint products of many minds and hands, had been largely inspired by him. The man in question was Ingo Potrykus, a professor of plant sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Zurich, where Albert Einstein had studied and taught. The caption, in large block lettering, read, “This rice could save a million kids a year.” The cover of the July 31, 2000, edition of Time magazine pictured a serious-looking bearded man surrounded by a wall of greenery: the stems, leaves, and stalks of rice plants.
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