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GM phobia spreads in South Asia

During the summer, a furor erupted in China introducing several GM crops, Chinese political over an allegedly unethical trial involving leaders hesitated. Protests from environmental Golden Rice tested in children. A news release groups, social science scholars and members of from Greenpeace China accused scientists of the public were heard around the country. The using children as guinea pigs, prompting a fear of losing international buyers might have nationwide outcry. The trial that caused the played a part, and initial enthusiasm gave way to uproar was designed to test whether rice geneti- public opposition and a cooling in top leaders cally engineered to exhibit endosperm-specific attitudes (Nat. Biotechnol. 28, 390391, 2010). expression of a phytoene synthase from daf- Some Chinese investigators are putting a posifodil (Narcissus pseudonarcissus) and a caro- tive slant on development. In a sense, it [slowtene desaturase (CrtI) from the soil bacterium ing commercialization of GM] is a good thing Erwinia uredovora could be absorbed by chil- because it will give us more time to develop a dren 68 years of age as a potential means to strong seed industry to compete with Western combat vitamin A deficiency. When the results, agricultural biotech giants, says Qifa Zhang, a which showed that Golden Rice was as effec- leading rice scientist at Wuhan-based Huazhong tive as pure beta-carotene in oil and better than Agricultural University. that available in spinach, were published online To shore up policymakers support for August 1 in the American Journal of Clinical science-based policy, earlier this year, a group Nutrition (96, 658664, 2012), Greenpeace of leading researchers from the Beijing-based launched its smear campaign, formenting wide- Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and spread public outrage. Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE) subThe Golden Rice spat is the latest in a wave of mitted a scientific report to top Chinese leadprotests erupting across southern Asia against ers. Such reports had, in the past, received GM products. In both China and India, the prompt state endorsement. Not this time. Top agbiotech sector previously enjoyed support policymakers issued a belated and lukewarm from state officials, but recently the public mood response. This could have been related to the has soured. The technology is now caught in the leadership transition scheduled last month, says crosshairs of local politicians. At the same time, Xiaoya Chen, a leading scientist and president of the media circus surrounding publication of Shanghai Institutes of Biological Sciences under a controversial French study has continued to CAS. A smooth power transition, which takes stoke the flames of public opinion. place every ten years, is currently the top priorThe Chinese state was once an aggressive pro- ity and politicians may be reluctant to stir public ponent of genetically modified (GM) food. In opprobrium with issues like GM crops. 2008, the state poured $3.8 billion into a 10-year Without a push from the top, most preR&D program on GM crops and animals. By commercialization research projects cannot 2009, China was on track to be the first to com- go ahead because the Chinese Ministry of mercialize a pest-resistant version of the coun- Agriculture, under public pressure, does not trys staple crop, Bacillus thuringiensis toxin (Bt) issue permits for environmental release of GM rice (Nat. Biotechnol. 28, 8, 2010), after state offi- crops. Research funding is suffering, too. The cials issued safety certificates. At the same time, a feed crop, a variety of maize that produces phytase to enable animals to better utilize phosphorus in feed was approved in 2009. Both approvals had to be followed by additional production trials, which would have meant another five years for GM seeds to be available for commercial purposes. But finding them- Golden rice, engineered to produce -carotene to prevent vitamin A selves on the brink of deficiency, compared with white rice.
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in brief
Commission calls for genomic privacy
A US bioethics panel is calling for privacy protection in a new report released in October. The Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues (PCSBI) lays out a dozen new recommendations in its report Privacy and Progress in Whole Genome Sequencing. The overall goal is to strike a balance between encouraging genomic research to benefit human health, on the one hand, and protecting the privacy of those whose genome are being sequenced, on the other. The Commission stops short of recommending national standards, calling instead on federal and state officials to work together to assure a consistent floor to protect privacy, says PCSBI chair Amy Gutmann, who is president of the University of Pennsylvania. About half the states have laws that already provide some protection. Even if the US Congress were to set national standards, however, privacy protections are likely to remain a jumble at the international level, where genomic sequence data sharing is expected to expand. And as the cost of sequencing drops, it is not a fantasy to imagine organizations surreptitiously taking saliva or other specimens to determine DNA sequences and then using such information to exclude some individuals and perhaps also their family members from life or health insurance coverage, according to Gutmann. The commission recommends fully informed consent for all human genomic sequencing, thus excluding surreptitious sequencing and thereby protecting citizens whenever whole-genomic sequencing is Jeffrey L Fox undertaken, she says.

2012 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved.

in their words
We have crossed some critical barriers but still need to do a lot of work to reach the final destination, Nisar Wani, head of the Reproductive Biology Laboratory at Dubais Camel Reproduction Center. Researchers in Dubai have established camel cell cultures in preparation for creating drug-producing transgenics. (SciDev.Net, 3 September 2012) This result knocked me off my chair, Scott Halstead, an adviser to the Dengue Vaccine Initiative comments on the disappointing efficacy of Sanofis dengue vaccine, which only reached half the expected 70% protection. (Reuters, 12 September 2012) These pleas are a victory for the American public, in demonstrating the FDAs commitment to investigating cases of individuals and businesses that prey on the sick and vulnerable with phony medical treatments, FDA Special Agent Patrick Holland comments on the guilty pleas entered by two fraudulent stem cell investigators, Lawrence Stowe and Frank Morales, who were outed in 2010 by the US television show 60 Minutes. (60 Minutes Overtime, 13 September 2012)

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Media leaps on French study claiming GM maize carcinogenicity
A scandalcried French newspaper Le nouvel Observateur following publication of a paper by Gilles-Eric Sralini from the University of Caen, in France, on a long-term study of the toxicity of GM maize. The studys online publication on September 19 by Food and Chemical Toxicology prompted a media frenzy. The study made a bombshell claim, completely unprecedented in the literature: rats fed for two years on Monsantos NK603 corn expressing 5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate synthase (EPSPS), cultivated with or without Roundup, and Roundup alone, develop a range of tumors. The authors claimed that the disruption of biosynthetic pathways that may result from overexpression of EPSPS in the GM French opposition to GMOs seems set to increase. maize can give rise to pathologies. The study, said to have cost 3 ($3.9) million, was dismissed as scientifically unsound by numerous scientists with or without ties to the agbiotech industry. Both the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) lamented inadequate experimental design, poor analysis and data reporting. Writing on behalf of the European Federation of Biotechnology, biotech pioneer Marc Van Montagu comments on the study. This paper represents a dangerous case of failure of the peer-review system. Van Montagu also lambasts the communication strategy of the authors. The publication was timed to coincide with a book on the experiment and a film to be broadcast on public television and in cinemas. Most unusually, an association representing Sralini offered interested journalists a confidentiality agreement to get early access to the paper that prevented signatories from approaching third-party researchers for comment, with a penalty of several million euros to be levied if the contract were breached. As a consequence, initial media coverage was almost ubiquitously noncritical. Controversy soon followed when funding ties with several supermarket chains promoting non-GM positions were revealed; Sralinis decision not to provide EFSA with additional unpublished data also did not help. If the intention was to manage the news, it wasnt managed very well, says Jonathan Amos from the BBC, which did not sign the confidentiality agreement. Despite the papers flaws, it seems likely that the initial coverage will negatively sway public and political opinion in France, where it seems to have hardened the socialist governments already unfriendly stance toward GM organisms. Before the French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health & Safety (Anses) could deliver its opinion (expected by the end of October), the agriculture minister Stphane Le Foll stated that long-term feeding studies should become mandatory for GM food crops, even if Sralinis work is debunked. Anna Meldolesi Rome

2012 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved.

biggest impact is expected in 2014 when GM rice and GM maize biosafety licenses expire. We are worried that the invalidity of biosafety licenses [for GM rice and maize] will dramatically postpone the commercialization process, says a scientist at Huazhong Agricultural University, who spoke to Nature Biotechnology on condition of anonymity. In India, politics have also become entangled in a radical about-face in GM crop commercialization. India was on the verge of marketing its first GM foodinsect-resistant Bt brinjal (eggplant). But a political row erupted and Bt brinjal approval was placed under an indefinite moratorium. That was 2010 (Nat. Biotechnol. 28, 296, 2010) and since then public opposition to GM foods has grown. On August 9, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Agriculture published a report urging the government to stop all open-field GM trials and confine all research to greenhouses until the regulatory system is revamped. The report, spearheaded by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), was written by a panel of 31 members of Parliament after examining, according to the panel, over 1,400 documents and interviewing scientists, civil society representatives and farmer organizations. Leading biochemists such as Govindarajan Padmanabhan at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, who
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is pro-GM, and scientists from the Department of Biotechnology, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and Indian Council of Agricultural Research, who also support the technology, were among those interviewed. Pushpa Bhargava, a biologist and founderdirector of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, who is opposed to GMwas also interviewed. India first embraced GM crops in 2002, allowing companies to produce and market cotton modified with the Bt gene using a technology owned by St. Louisbased Monsanto (Nat. Biotechnol. 20, 415, 2002). After a few years, public resistance began to rise, driven by activists and NGOs, culminating with the moratorium on Bt brinjal, despite the fact that the crop had been approved for commercialization. The latest report to the Indian government is damning. The panel unanimously declared after critically analyzing the evidence for and against that there are better options available than GM crops for increasing food production. The cultivation of Bt cotton, widely regarded as a commercial success, was also dismissed as beneficial to industry and only added to the miseries of farmers (Nature 487, 8, 2012). The report is a big setback, says Kottaram Narayanan, managing director of Metahelix Life Sciences in Bangalore and an executive

of the industry body ABLE (Association of Biotechnology-Led Enterprises). The narrow thinking of our politicians under the influence of a few NGOs is really jeopardizing the countrys progress in agriculture, adds Arvind Kapur an executive of Rasi Seeds, one of the first Indian companies to market Bt cotton. Padmanabhan fears the move will deprive the country of a powerful technology option to cater to the needs of millions of children suffering from malnutrition. If implemented, the reports recommendations could slow downand perhaps halt much transgenic work, not just in private companies, but also in the public sector. In response, on October 9, the prime ministers Scientific Advisory Council, chaired by C.N.R. Rao called for a judicious blend of traditional breeding and new technologies. Until any formal policy decisions are made, it is unclear how damaging the report will be to the dissemination of GM technology in India, says Kottaram. Even before this report came out, the requirement to obtain a no objection certificate from state governments was slowing down GM crop trials. Despite the prevailing mood, the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), which currently funds research on some 30 GM crops, will maintain its support for the technology. In fact, only recently [on August 29] we signed a deal with

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Australias Queensland University of Technology for promoting AGM banana [for enhanced iron content], DBT secretary Maharaj Kishan Bhan told Nature Biotechnology. An indication that the government is serious about promoting GM research, if not products, also came with a cabinet announcement on August 23 to establish a Rs 2.87 billion ($54.1 million) research center dedicated to agbiotech at Ranchi. Bhan says the reports negative conclusions were likely prompted by the panels apprehension that multinational companies are taking control of Indias seed business. To allay these fears, we have to fast track our regulatory policy for products made in India, he suggests.
Killugudi Jayaraman Bangalore India and Hepeng Jia Beijing

Opposition thaws for GM crops in Africa

By contrast, the African continent is overcoming its initial apprehensions about GM crops, prompted by skepticism in the European export market and by the activities of NGOs. Earlier this year, Ghanas recently established National Biosafety Committee received three applications from scientists to conduct research and field trials on GM crops, one for cowpea and two for sweet potato. If these applications are approved, Ghana will become the seventh African country cultivating GM crops. Currently, however, only three African countriesBurkina Faso, Egypt and South Africagrow GM crops commercially. Seed sales in South Africa, the biggest producer of GM crops in Africa, show that Bt maize and Roundup Ready soybean make up about two-thirds of maize and soybean sales, and all cotton seed sales are of Bt cotton. Although few African countries are planting GM varieties, nearly 20 nations have fully fledged biosafety regulations. Diran Makinde, the director of the African Biosafety Network and Expertise (ABNE) says many francophone countries adopted laws based on the precautionary approach endorsed by the European Union. These made those planting GM cropswhether companies or research institutesliable for any harm resulting from it, which meant nobody was willing to take the risk. Currently, only a very few countries are opposed outright to GM. The only African country with a straight-up moratorium is Benin, whereas Angola simply says it is not interested. But there is still plenty of resistance to GM technology throughout Africa. The first concern is whether the technology itself is safe for humans and animals as well as for the environment. The second is fear that big agribusinesses will exploit poor farmers by controlling seed production. These concerns are often put forward by activist groups, such as Biowatch South Africa and the African Centre for Biosafety, also based in South Africa, or international organizations like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace. As for the man on the street, his general understanding of the technology remains low. Misinformation abounds, says Andrew Kiggundu, a researcher at Ugandas Kawanda Research Institute, based near Kampala. Uganda does not yet have a biosafety bill to regulate commercial growing of GM crops. But most Ugandans believe that the crops developed at the institute using biotech are GM varieties. Linda nordling Cape Town, South Africa

2012 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved.

Around the world in a month

DENMARK

Hundreds of individual residents provided donations to help fund the sequencing of the Puerto Rican parrot (Amazona vittata), the only surviving parrot species native to the United States.

PUERTO RICO

Leo Pharma sets up a series of long-term collaborations with clinical researchers at Berlins Charit University Hospital to discover new treatments for skin conditions including psoriasis and actinic keratosis.

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A new modular facility for the large-scale production of cell-based medicinal products launches near Paris. The 110 ($144)-million initiative aimed at developing a local cell therapy industry was set up by the C4C project, a consortium of the biotechs LFB, Celogos and CleanCells, seven public sector institutions and the state innovation agency OSEO. Companies doing applied research will benet from a substantial R&D tax credit to boost research. From September, businesses will be able to claim in-house research as well as reduce tax bills by up to 35% of the amount invested in research.

FRANCE

CHILE

A new program to boost technological innovation and capacity building receives a $200-million loan from the Inter-American Development Bank. SMEs in the agricultural, energy, health and climate-change areas will be a priority.

ARGENTINA

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