Download Pdf of Rice Today article


Gary Toenniessen
"Rock" and Rice: the Rockefeller-IRRI biotechnology saga

Next year, 2010, marks not only the International Rice Research Institute’s 50th anniversary but also a half a century of collaboration between the Institute and its co-founder, the Rockefeller Foundation. This includes an alliance that started a quarter century ago to help create the new discipline of rice biotechnology. When that effort began in 1984, Gary Toenniessen, currently a managing director of the Foundation, led the charge to bring the new developments in molecular and cellular biology to rice. He shows what can be accomplished with around US$120 million of funding and a cornucopia of ideas and tells some fascinating, little-known tales about how rice became the model crop for biotechnology research.   

A career with the Rockefeller Foundation
I grew up on a farm in upstate New York. When you grow up on a farm, you mainly work on that farm, as I did, all the way through undergraduate school. I basically commuted to the State University of New York at Buffalo and worked on the farm weekends and all through the summer. I chose mathematics at the university because it came to me easily. So, I didn’t have to spend an awful lot of time at the university. I then received a fellowship from the U.S. Public Health Service that sent me  to graduate school. The other alternative I had at that particular time was going to the Vietnam War. So, going to graduate school was certainly a better alternative. I chose the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and spent 5 years there getting my PhD degree in microbiology.
            When I was looking around for a job at the end of that training period, the Rockefeller Foundation contacted me about a new type of postdoctoral fellowship they had where one worked with the Foundation while also pursuing some research at a nearby research institute. I received one of those fellowships and, within a year, I was made a program officer of the Rockefeller Foundation. So, for almost my entire career, which is now 38 years, I have been a program officer in the New York office of the Rockefeller Foundation.
            I was trained as a microbiologist and that meant molecular biology as well. So, when the Foundation, in the late 1970s-early 1980s, decided to move into applying the new tools of molecular and cellular biology to crop improvement, I was one of the people on the staff who knew something about molecular biology and I began working in that area and assumed more responsibility for the Foundation’s investments in that area. Once the Rice Biotechnology Program began [in 1984], I more or less ran that program from the New York office. We also had John O’Toole, a former IRRI agronomist and rice physiologist [1974-84], working on the program, initially from India and then from Bangkok; and Tosh Murashige helping in China, Korea, and the Philippines.
            So, that’s pretty much my history. I’m still with the Foundation. In recent years, we’re working more in Africa. So, I spend a lot of time on the African Program today. But I have to say the most rewarding work I’ve done with the Foundation was that period of time from about 1984 to 2002 when we invested about US$120 million in the Rice Biotechnology Program. I worked very closely with IRRI during that whole period of time.

RF’s course change from doing to funding
Foundations are organizations that are prone to significant change. In large part because there is not a huge capital investment in buildings and the like and there isn’t a huge investment in large staffs, unlike universities where you have tenured professors and a lot of faculty. So, foundations tend to change quite significantly when new leadership comes in and, in my history with the Rockefeller Foundation, that certainly occurred with every new president. In 1980, Dr. Richard W. Lyman [photo left] became president of the Foundation. He had been president of Stanford University before he came to the Foundation. He had quite a different philosophy about what a foundation should do, different from what the Foundation was actually doing at that time. At that time, we had about eight program officers in agriculture in New York and 40 some in the field. Some were located at international centers such as IRRI, CIMMYT, and CIAT. His feeling was that foundations really shouldn’t be operational. They should be organizations that provide funds to others who get the job done. In the case of agriculture, he congratulated us for helping to establish IRRI, CIMMYT, CIAT, and IITA and a number of the other international centers and for creating mechanisms, such as the CGIAR, to fund those centers.
            But he asked the question: Why do we need to continue having our own staff [in these areas] when those centers now exist? To help resolve that question, he put together an external team of advisors to assess, first of all, whether or not the Rockefeller Foundation should even continue in agriculture and, secondly whether the Foundation should continue in agriculture, what it should do moving forward. That was a three-person team: Robert McNamara, then president of the World Bank; Bryant Kearl, who was vice chancellor of the University of Wisconsin; and Perry Atkinson, chancellor of Texas A&M University. They came back with a report (A Review of the Rockefeller Foundation Conquest of Hunger Program, August 1982 - Rockefeller Archives Center), which, like the new president, congratulated the Foundation for what its field programs had accomplished. And they agreed with him that it was now possible for the Foundation to bring its field operations to a close. In fact, I can remember their report stating that, in many ways, the era in which expatriate scientists go out and actually conduct the research was coming to a close and what the Foundation should really do is to find ways of supporting the international centers and strengthening existing national programs.
            So, that team of advisors recommended that the Foundation work in two principal areas. One was to make sure that the new advances that were occurring in cellular and molecular biology were applied to tropical crops, which were important in developing countries and which were the staple foods of the poor in those countries. And secondly, the Foundation should develop a strategy for Africa where the food situation was deteriorating. So, those were the two directions that we moved in.
            I must say that it was a difficult time because to implement that, we did go through a process of letting go of most of our field staff and a lot of staff in New York over a 2- or 3-year period. Most of them were pretty close to retirement or past early retirement age, so we were able to allow them to retire from the Foundation and take a salary from some international center. We also created the International Agricultural Development Service, which, in 1985, merged with Winrock International. So, a number of staff members were also transferred to that new organization that focused on helping to strengthen national programs. In fact even before Dr. Lyman became president, the International Agriculture Development Service had been created because it was recognized that the strengthening of national programs was a high priority and the Foundation was looking for a way to help the broader donor community contribute to that process.

Creating rice biotechnology
So, we then moved quite quickly to implement the first recommendation, which was to apply the new developments in molecular and cellular biology to tropical crops. Dr. Alva App, the new RF director of agriculture, came in. Al had spent about 6 years [1976-82] at IRRI as a visiting scientist seconded to IRRI as an employee of the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research, to lead the work on the azolla – rice combination. So, it was clear to me, from the time Al arrived, that we were going to work on rice because he quite correctly recognized its importance. But we still did go through, or he had me go through, a very systematic process of looking at the eight most important crops in determining whether or not the breeding programs were strong enough in those crops to make it reasonable to introduce a biotechnology program and what the impact would be if the Foundation did do that. When we compared all of the results, rice was clearly at the top.
            We could build on what were already strong breeding programs. IRRI was there so we had a strong partner to work with and, of course, rice fed more people than any other crop. Cassava actually came up fairly high as well. But the breeding programs for cassava were nowhere near as strong as the breeding programs for rice, so we wound up investing, I would say, about 80% of the funds that we committed to biotechnology to rice over the 1984 to 2002 period. As I said, we committed about US$120 million to that work over a period of 17-18 years.
             First of all, we received approval from our trustees to make a major long-term commitment. So, the initial document that went to the Foundation’s trustees in December 1984 informed them that this was likely to be a 15 or more-year-long program and, at that time, we said that and the Foundation was likely to commit US$80 million or more. If you adjust US$80 million for inflation over that period of time, it comes out to about $120 million. So, we were able to do a lot of things that we wouldn’t otherwise have been able to do because we knew we had that commitment from the trustees.
            We designed the program to have three major components. The first was to “create” rice biotechnology. Molecular biology was a brand new discipline in the early 1980s and there was nobody in the world, except for a few Japanese who were doing serious work on rice molecular biology. There was no biotechnology program at IRRI. There were no rice molecular biology programs in the United States. I know because I went around and I visited the leading molecular biology laboratories and determined that none of them were working on rice. I visited the major rice research institutions around the world and determined that none of them were doing any significant work on molecular biology. So, it was a wide open opportunity for the Foundation to lead the effort to create a significant biotechnology research program for the most important food crop in the world.
            Creating that technology was the first component. That meant creating a molecular genetic map of rice and then creating the tools that would allow the genetic engineering of rice. It meant understanding the way the rice genome is structured, understanding at the molecular level the relationship between rice and rice pathogens. There was a lot of investment in those basic tools that make up the set of technologies that we call biotechnology.

Finding relevant traits
The second component was to work on the traits for which one would want to use those tools to introduce into rice once the tools were available. But we needed to understand those traits at the molecular level in order to use molecular tools. We hired Bob Herdt [photo right, IRRI economist, 1973-83, head of the IRRI Economics Department, 1978-83; later director, agricultural sciences, and RF vice president; currently adjunct international professor of applied economics and management, Cornell University] as our colleague at that time. Previously, his job at IRRI had been to prioritize traits that IRRI was going to work on so he had already developed the methodology for prioritizing traits and he did the same thing for the Foundation’s rice biotechnology program.
            It’s basically a technique that measures the yield forgone because you don’t have that trait. For example, at that particular time, there were no known genes for resistance to the rice tungro virus, which, at that time, was causing a lot of problems in the Philippines and other countries in Southeast Asia. So, that turned out to be very high on his list of priorities. There were reasons to believe that biotechnology would work as a way of addressing the tungro virus problem. We had a list of about 20 traits. One of those traits—perhaps #17 or 18—was yellow endosperm rice and I’ll come back to explaining how we identified that [i.e., Golden Rice] as a trait.

Building molecular biology capacity in Asia
The third component was capacity building in the Asian rice research institutions, but in the more fundamental research institutions in Asia as well, because it was in those more fundamental research institutions that capacity to do molecular biology really existed. So, in places like India, China, Thailand, and the Philippines, we tried to link the more fundamental research programs with the rice research institutions within those countries. That involved a lot of training and, during that 17-18-year period, the Foundation supported about 400 fellowships for Asian scientists, many of whom went to advanced laboratories in the U.S., Europe, Australia, and Japan, where we were funding the work on tool development. Most of the actual work that led to important discoveries was done by Asian scientists in a laboratory in the U.S. or somewhere else. Since they were the “inventors” of the tools, they had a real sense of ownership. When they went back home, there was a real sense of pride and desire to use those tools within their home countries and the Foundation supported them when they went home.
            Over time, the funds that were going into tool development and into work on the traits shifted from the West—the U.S. and Europe—to the Asian countries, particularly China, India, and Thailand, where they began developing real capacity. By about 2000, when we would have meetings of our rice biotechnology network, we had scientists from the major companies working in biotechnology asking to come to those meetings. We also had scientists from laboratories that we weren’t supporting around the world asking to come to those meetings because they would learn not only the most recent results in rice biotechnology but also biotechnology in general from some of the Asian programs that we were supporting. That’s when we realized that we had achieved our goal, when the Asian scientists were at the forefront of doing the research on tool development and working on the traits. We recognized that we had accomplished our goal of making sure that the new tools on molecular biology would be applied to rice and that was certainly proven to be the case. We see Asian countries continuing to make major advances in the development and application of rice biotechnology with China and India, for example, now having as much capability as Monsanto or Syngenta or any of the major corporations. So, that’s an overview of the Rice Biotechnology Program.

The Golden Rice story
What might be useful now is to tell the story of one of those traits, which is Golden Rice, and then maybe two stories about the tools, which would be the rice molecular map and the rice sequence because it's interesting to know how those came about as targets of the Foundation and to look at the process of how our grantees developed them.
            So, let’s start with Golden Rice. The idea behind Golden Rice actually originated at IRRI over at the guesthouse in the lounge area. In April 1984, even before we had made a decision to focus on rice, the Foundation sponsored a conference at IRRI, which was called the Intercenter Seminar on International Agricultural Research Centers (IARCs) and Biotechnology. The purpose of that conference was to bring together breeders from all of the CGIAR centers and some of the best scientists who were then at the forefront of developing biotechnology—in 1984, still a very young field. We had about 200 people at this conference.
            One evening, after the biotechnology presentations, a group of breeders from the centers was sitting around in the lounge area at the guesthouse having a few beers. Then, they started talking about how unrealistic what they had heard during the day was. Breeders, at that time, were quite skeptical about biotechnology. They had seen a number of other technologies that were going to revolutionize breeding or replace breeding, such as radiation breeding and somaclonal variation, most of which never went much of anywhere. The other reason why the breeders were a little bit skeptical was that the scientists who created plant biotechnology, for the most part, were not breeders and not even plant scientists. The people who created plant biotechnology mainly came from microbiology, bacteriology, and virology backgrounds.  It is bacteria that allow one to manipulate DNA both from the standpoint of just understanding sequences and how DNA is put together, but also as far as genetically engineering crops is concerned. Agrobacteria are nature’s tool for doing genetic engineering and so most of the people who were at the forefront of the field were those working on Agrobacteria. They had worked on molecular biology in microbes and were now moving over to plants.
            I have to admit that they made some rather unrealistic speculations as to what the technology was going to be able to do for breeding. We were going to be able to put nitrogen fixation genes into rice, for example. Some of these things we are actually thinking about doing today, but they were talking about doing them back in 1984 and doing it in 2 or 3 years.

              So, these breeders were sitting around, kind of joking and laughing about how these biotechnologists were going to stick any gene into rice. Now, I was at this conference, in part, to learn as much as I could and to get ideas as to what the Foundation might invest in. So, I was sitting there too and I asked, “Well what is your favorite gene then?” These biotechnologists say they can stick any gene into rice and make it do what they want it to do. “If you guys as breeders could do that, what would be your favorite gene?” Neil Rutger, who was a breeder at UC Davis at that time, took the lead and he asked each one in the group, “Yes, what’s your favorite gene?”
            We went around and most of them were not surprising: “blast resistance,” said one; “drought tolerance,” said another. Finally, we got around to Pete Jennings [photo left]. First, just a little bit of background on Pete Jennings. He was a Rockefeller Foundation employee seconded initially to IRRI and then to CIAT but was really a Rockefeller Foundation employee for 30 some years, I think. He had been the first breeder at IRRI and made the initial cross that led to IR8. He then left IRRI after several years and went to CIAT in Colombia to develop most of the rice varieties that are grown in Latin America today—or at least the breeding lines that led to those varieties. So, Pete knew what he was talking about and, while I was listening very intently to what he was going to say, when he said “yellow endosperm,” it didn’t make any sense to me because I didn’t know anything about why yellow endosperm would be  an attractive or desirable trait. I asked, “why?”. And I think some of the other breeders there responded in the same way. Yellow endosperm? Pete went on to explain that he recognized that Vitamin A deficiency was a serious problem throughout Asia and particularly in rice-consuming populations because there is no pro-Vitamin A or beta carotene in rice. Children, when they are being weaned, are fed a gruel, which is made up almost totally of rice, and therefore they often lack Vitamin A, thus suffering the direct consequences of [possible blindness] and susceptibility to diseases.
             That made a lot of sense to me. When I went back to New York, my job was to begin thinking about how we might put together research programs to address each of these traits. Bob Herdt, when he put his priorities together, found yellow endosperm very difficult to put into his system because there was no "yield forgone." His method required that, so he tried to develop a way of pricing what yellow endosperm might allow in the sense of not having to provide supplementation and fortification programs. So, he was able to build that into his priorities and it did become one of our priority traits. [See Bob Herdt’s chapter, Research priorities for rice biotechnology, in the 1991 book I edited with Gurdev Khush, Rice biotechnology.]
            You need to realize that, at that particular time, the technology was still in its infancy, so there was very little that we were able to do immediately. I did go around to two of the leading laboratories in the world—at Harvard University and Rockefeller University—that worked on the molecular biology of chloroplasts because the beta carotene is produced and used in the chloroplast. I thought those laboratories might have an interest in working on what we were then calling yellow endosperm rice. Both labs considered this an intriguing idea, but, even though I was indirectly suggesting that the Rockefeller Foundation would provide significant funding for a significant number of years, they said they would not be interested in pursuing it because they thought it was too difficult a task. It would mean engineering the whole pathway and the protein enzymes that are produced for each step in that pathway would have to be packaged in the chloroplast in just the right way in order for the sequence of those reactions to take place. At least, that was the argument that they presented for thinking that this was basically too difficult to do at that stage of the technology.
           However, Lawrence Bogorad [photo left] at the Harvard lab did say to me, “You know, what you really ought to do is find out how maize accomplishes this because yellow maize produces beta carotene in the endosperm and that’s a mutant.” Wild-type maize is white and yellow maize is a mutant that produces beta carotene in the endosperm for no good reason. The beta carotene is a photosynthetic pigment. The endosperm is not a photosynthetic tissue--it’s being produced there, causing no harm to the plant, but doing a lot of good for the people who eat the maize.
           So, how could we find out what’s going on in maize. At that particular time, Donald Robertson, a geneticist at Iowa State University, had identified and worked on a “jumping gene” that was called Robertson’s mutator. He had lines of yellow maize in which Robertson’s mutator had jumped into the y1 locus. Y1 was the locus that determined whether you had yellow maize or white maize. One of the tools that did exist at that time was gene cloning by these jumping genes. So, we gave him a grant to clone the y1 gene from maize and he, and I think everybody else, thought that that gene was going to be a regulatory gene because it controlled a whole pathway that involved four other enzymatic steps. When they cloned it, it turned out that it was not a regulatory gene but rather it was phytoene synthase, the first enzyme in the 40-carbon path that leads to beta carotene. In the beta carotene biosynthetic pathway, there are two 20-carbon compounds that, when combined, form phytoene. Then, the phytoene goes through three more enzymatic steps before it reaches beta carotene. So, the regulatory mechanism in maize was the amount of phytoene synthase that existed in the endosperm, which was very encouraging, because that led one to think that maybe, if the gene for phytoene synthase is expressed in the rice endosperm, the same results that occur in maize would occur in rice.
            We also funded a lab at the University of Liverpool that showed that the 20-carbon precursors that are combined to form phytoene were present in rice endosperm. So, the precursors were there and the argument that we were willing to put forth was that if you added the gene for phytoene synthase it would produce phytoene and that might actually induce the other genes in the pathway, which appears to be what happened in the case of maize.
           The next step in the Golden Rice story was to put together what Ingo Portrykus, the scientist who was to lead all the breakthroughs with Golden Rice, called a brainstorming session, which we just called a workshop [at the Foundation’s New York headquarters] where we brought together about 20 scientists, including two or three nutritionists who laid out the argument of what a beta carotene-producing rice could accomplish; four or five of the world’s leading carotenoid biochemists who knew all about the biochemistry of that pathway that led from the 20-carbon compounds to the beta carotene end product and actually beyond beta carotene because, in some cases, the pathway does go beyond beta carotene; and a group of scientists who were the most advanced in rice genetic engineering. This was now about 1993 and, through the Rockefeller Foundation Program, the tools for genetically engineering rice had been developed. They were still somewhat rudimentary, but you could genetically engineer rice. You could introduce genes.
            Two key persons whom we invited were Ingo Portrykus, [photo above left] a gene jockey from the ETH [Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule; the MIT of Europe] in Zurich, Switzerland. He was one of the first people who was able to genetically engineer rice. Also attending was Peter Beyer [photo below right] from the University of Freiburg in Germany, who were one of the world’s leading carotenoid biochemists. Interestingly, they did not know one another and they met on the airplane coming to this workshop. They began talking and hit it off personally. When they got to the workshop, they continued to have these conversations.
            The result of that workshop was, first of all, a feeling on the part of everybody there that this would be a challenging goal to produce beta carotene in rice endosperm. But it's a doable goal. They came up with two strategies [see International Program on Rice Biotechnology Workshop Report: Potential for Carotenoid Biosynthesis in Rice Endosperm, June 1993: Rockefeller Archive Center]. One strategy was to simply introduce all four of the genes that were necessary to produce the four enzymes in the pathway. The thinking at that time was that they’d be introduced individually and then crossed in order to combine them into a single variety.
            The second strategy was to turn on the genes that already exist in rice. Rice produces beta carotene. All green plants produce beta carotene. It’s an essential photosynthetic pigment. In rice, however, the genes were turned on in the green tissues but not in the endosperm. We would try to come up with any strategy to turn on those genes in the endosperm. I might add that, way back, one of the early experiments we funded was to screen the gene bank at IRRI to see if there was naturally occurring yellow endosperm rice but IRRI breeder Gurdev Khush and his colleagues were not able to find any materials like that.       

                So, we wound up funding both approaches. After that workshop, we got a proposal from Ingo and Peter. They proposed putting in the four genes. Then, we got a proposal from another team that was going to study what is blocking this pathway in the endosperm of rice and then try to overcome whatever that blockage was. They were difficult research programs. I think Ingo had disappointing results at least three times before he had his final breakthrough. I guess it wasn’t disappointing, but one of the first things he did was to put in the gene for phytoene synthase. The rice endosperm produced phytoene, but it didn’t go any further than that. So, they then began trying to put in the genes for the next step and it turned out that the gene for the second step in plants is an extremely complex gene and an extremely complex protein. They had a lot of trouble even trying to get that gene expressed.
            Going back to the 1993 workshop, we had invited a Japanese scientist from Japan Tobacco who had been working on a bacterial gene that was able to carry out two steps in that pathway. Their interest was really in being able to use this as a way of developing herbicide resistance. Lots of herbicides interfere with the photosynthetic process and with compounds such as beta carotene, which protect the photosynthetic process. At the workshop, he had shown how this one bacterial gene, referred to as the crt1 gene, carried out those pathways. So, Ingo asked him for that gene and he sent it. Ingo then incorporated that gene, the phytoene synthase gene, and a third gene as well in what he called one big experiment that added all those genes to rice.
            At just about the time that Ingo was going to retire from ETH in 1999, the breakthrough occurred. Ingo produced the transformations and sent them to Peter. As Peter was harvesting some of the seed and polishing them, he noticed that they were yellow. He called up Ingo and they had a celebration that night because they had achieved the breakthrough that they were looking for.
            I think all of us thought, at that time, that we were going to be 2-3 years away from being able to have Golden Rice in the field. Both Ingo and I and almost everybody in public sector work, at that time, were pretty naïve about what was going to be required to actually take one of these products to the field. We very quickly learned that there were a number of constraints in addition to the technical constraints. There were intellectual property rights. It turns out that Ingo had probably utilized materials, tools, and techniques that infringed on roughly 40 different patents or potentially infringed on those patents.
            Then there was also an increasingly burdensome regulatory process that any transient crop had to go through in order, not only to be commercialized but also just to do the research. To send transgenic materials from one country to another country is extremely complex. The way this was eventually sorted out was that Ingo and Peter took out a patent on their discovery. They had no intention of making any money on the patent or restricting anybody from using it. But, by taking out a patent on their material, it gave them a bargaining chip to deal with some of the other organizations who held the patents that they had inadvertently infringed upon in doing their research.
            That led to a relationship with what was then the Zeneca Corporation, which was planning to commercialize crops that had increased levels of beta carotene for a variety of different reasons, some of them health reasons, some of them appearance reasons. Zeneca had accumulated a portfolio of patents around that technology and they agreed to cross-license. If they could have access to Ingo’s and Peter’s patent, they would cross-license their patents and, in addition to that, because this was a humanitarian project with the potential of benefiting many people, they took the lead in getting licenses from other companies and other groups that also were interested in seeing this particular product move forward.
            In addition to that, they began doing some research on rice themselves and that was fortunate because, as I mentioned, Ingo was retiring and therefore he wasn’t able to carry this research forward himself. A couple of years after Zeneca began this work, there was a number of mergers and the Zeneca Agricultural Program wound up being part  of what is today Syngenta. Syngenta was pursuing this research and produced a number of yellow endosperm rice lines. They then decided, as a result of one of those mergers I think, that the merged entity had too many research programs, so they decided to bring this rice research program to a close. They didn’t see this as a commercially competitive line of research and so they agreed to finish up what they were working on and share the material they had with Ingo and Peter and the Humanitarian Board that Ingo and Peter had created to advise them.

            I want to go back a little bit and explain where the name “Golden Rice” came from. Ingo first presented his results during the last meeting of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Rice Biotechnology Network held in Phuket, Thailand, in September 1999. It was one of several important scientific breakthroughs that were presented at that meeting. Following the meeting, Bob Herdt, John O’Toole, and I stayed on in Bangkok. John was based in Bangkok and we needed to spend a couple of days figuring out the next phases of the work that he was going to be doing from that office. Anyway, we wound up having dinner one evening with a friend of John’s, Mr. Mechai Viravaidya,  Thailand's 'Condom King'—so-called due to his extensive work promoting accessible contraceptives over 30 years in Thailand—and a former member of IRRI’s Board of Trustees [1995-2000, photo left]. He distributed those condoms in very innovative ways. He had colored condoms. He gave away condoms if you bought 10 liters of gasoline at the local gas station and the like. He made it acceptable to be seen buying condoms and almost made it a treat. So, we were having dinner with him and we’re telling him some of the exciting results that had occurred at the meeting in Phuket and said to him, “You know that one of these is the recent development of yellow endosperm rice, which produces beta carotene." He immediately recognized the importance of this because he’d been heading an NGO [Population and Community Development Association] that had been dealing with the vitamin A deficiency problems.
            I can remember him saying, “You aggies do not understand marketing. You don’t call this yellow endosperm rice. You call this ‘Golden’ Rice. You got to have a marketing campaign behind this. You got to make it a treat to eat Golden Rice. It’s got to be better than white rice.” So, we listened very intently and took his ideas. I can remember going back and telling Ingo, “we got to start calling this Golden Rice.” Ingo caught on immediately. That’s how the name Golden Rice originated.
            To finish up the story, eventually Ingo and Peter were able to reach an agreement with Syngenta where Syngenta provided materials that had been developed and screened for what we call “events” ( lines that have a very clearly defined introduced gene in them) that could meet all regulatory approvals. They agreed to make those lines available for the humanitarian work under a very detailed licensing agreement, but basically one which would make this trait freely available to all farmers who were making less than US$10,000 a year. Clearly, people who were suffering from Vitamin A deficiency weren’t likely to be farmers making more than $10,000 a year—so it's not really a very significant constraint to using this product for humanitarian purposes.
            The next step is to move that trait from the lines that were developed at Syngenta into the lines that are important in the Vitamin A-deficient region of Asian countries. So,  just this past year, the Rockefeller Foundation gave a $4 million dollar grant to IRRI that allows IRRI to collaborate with India, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Indonesia, and probably Vietnam to move the beta carotene production in endosperm trait into the lines that are important in those countries.
            Now, exciting results coming from IRRI and from some feeding trials indicate that the lines we currently have will more than meet the needs of the people to totally overcome vitamin A deficiency that they currently suffer from. It’s a very exciting development. We’ve got a great product and the effort now is to get it through the regulatory approval process in each of those five countries. So, we’re at the stage now where we’re confident that we can carry it through to actually grow this product in the field.
            Most likely, we will move forward first in the Philippines, in part, because IRRI is there and so it’s much easier to move transgenic materials back and forth between IRRI and PhilRice [Philippine Rice Research Institute, the national program]. Every time you send transgenic materials across international boundaries, you had to get approval to do that. It can take up to 6 months just to get approvals to send this material to India or to places like Bangladesh. So, the projections for the Philippines are that it’ll probably be through the regulatory process and be ready for release to farmers within 3 years. In part, because IRRI has done a lot of work, so PhilRice doesn’t have to start from scratch. A BC3 population here at IRRI  can now be given to PhilRice and they can begin producing a finished product in a relatively short period of time and doing the field trials that are necessary to obtain regulatory approval.
           Regarding consumer acceptability, Golden Rice is a beautiful product. It looks like saffron rice [at right in photo above compared with regular rice]. So, any population that already has certain colors, turmeric, saffron, etc., I think it’s going to be an attractive product. At the same time, we don’t dismiss that this may well be a problem. There’ll probably be some need to convince people that this is a quality product and one that actually has significantly added value. Going back to Mechai’s comment, we’ve got to make this a prize, not something that people are going to think of as an inferior product in any way.
            In addition, it may be wise to get this product to consumers through the national feeding programs as well. In most of these countries, the government already buys about 20-30% of the rice and uses it in national feeding programs. It shouldn’t be too difficult to convince governments that this is a very valuable product. Secondly, most of these governments are already spending a lot of money on vitamin A supplementation programs and this product, once it is produced, really doesn’t have any significant cost associated with it because it self-replicates. So, in the case of Golden Rice, all the costs are up front in producing the product. It’s not like supplementation where you’ve got to pay for the supplementation every time you use it. I think governments will find this attractive, nt only from the standpoint of its potential positive impact on the health of the population but also just from a financial standpoint. They will be able to meet the needs of their people at much less cost and actually much more effectively than the programs that they currently have. I think we can get governments behind it and that they’ll help to promote both the attractiveness of the product and its broader dissemination through some of these government programs.
           Most of the critics of Golden Rice are really critics of GMOs [genetically modified organisms]. They see Golden Rice as a threat because it is a GMO that has the potential to benefit millions of people and therefore it destroys their argument that this is just a technology that is going to benefit big companies. They see it as a Trojan horse. If they let Golden Rice through, which most of them realize would be a good thing, then it turns loose all GMOs and so it’s a problem.
           They’re going to continue to oppose Golden Rice, but I think increasingly, particularly in Asia, governments and the public are beginning to realize that GMOs are very useful products. If you just look at Bt cotton in India, it has doubled cotton production in India and significantly reduced pesticide use and all the other problems associated with pesticides.
            Governments are beginning to recognize this and, quite frankly, they are also beginning to discount the arguments that are being made by the opposition because the opposition was as opposed to Bt cotton in India as it is to Golden Rice. The public and governments look at what happened with Bt cotton and see all the benefits coming with it. So, I think, you do see a diminishing opposition to GMOs, particularly in Asia, not so much yet in Europe. Europeans have huge food surpluses so they don’t need to worry so much about food production and agricultural development as Asian countries do.