Miracle or menace? : biotechnology and the third world / by Robert Walgate.

  • Walgate, Robert.
Date:
[1990], ©1990
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Miracle or menace? : biotechnology and the third world / by Robert Walgate. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Chapter 2: Finding genes for better crops 19 The Rockefeller Foundation Rice Biotechnology Programme To prepare its own rice biotechnology programme, the Rockefeller Foundation developed a detailed list of research priorities, combining questions of need and biotechnical feasibility, and then set about putting together a team of rice biotechnologists. North and South, to add to the few pioneers already at work. They came willingly. One leading US biotechnologist, when asked why she had turned to rice biotechnology, said realistically, because the money was offered... Every problem in biology is interesting, and you work where the grants are. Others feel the same. It is clear that if donors put money into important biological problems that affect the South, then scientists will follow. Results have come extremely fast (some are described in this dossier), bringing rice to the stage where it is poised to become the model cereal for biotechnology experiments. Now rice seems set to stay on the research agenda even if Rockefeller's research funds are withdrawn [ii]. The proof of this, however, will only come when new improved rices, useful in developing country conditions, are produced through the programme. This will take time. The most immediate, practical applications of rice biotechnology are mostly likely to come from: • A map of the rice genes being developed at Cornell University, in the United States, to help researchers and breeders find the genes they need. This will speed the identification and breeding-in of useful characteristics, which is carried out at the international and national rice breeding centres. For example, the soils of the acidic uplands and lowlands of India are affected by aluminium and iron. Some local rice plants can tolerate the metals, and, in Hyderabad, geneticists are using genetic maps to study the genes causing that tolerance, with the aim of introducing them into agriculturally more useful varieties. • The use of tissue culture techniques which greatly accelerate breeding and enable breeders to cross good but delicate rices with wild — but hardy — relatives. The top seven application priorities of the programme, taking into account both the impact that problems with rice can have on poverty, and the probable ease of their solution by biotechnology, are: • Tungro virus. • Yellow stem-borer (an insect).