This week was the first week for our new intern, Anna Kushnir. You may know her as one of Nature Network’s more active bloggers. She’s just graduated with her PhD from Harvard Medical School and will be spending six months helping us grow the community on Nature Network. Welcome Anna to the NN family!
She will also help me cover the Boston beat so starting today you’ll see posts here from both me and her. Over time, this blog will evolve to be less like “Corie’s” blog and more the “Boston blog” with multiple people contributing.
So to kick off, today, here is Anna’s entry about a talk she attended on Wednesday.
Genetics and the future of food and farming
Anna Kushnir
A talk that combines science and food? This was a talk I could not afford to miss. This week, I had the distinct pleasure of attending Pamela Ronald’s lecture at MGH discussing her new book, Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food.
Dr. Ronald is a geneticist and runs a large lab in the Department of Plant Pathology at University of California, Davis. She has just written the aforementioned book with her husband Raoul, who is, conveniently enough, an organic farmer. (She is also a blogger on Nature Network.)
In her talk, Dr. Ronald listed multiple (and ominous) drawbacks of the current model of agriculture including soil erosion, farmers poisoned by rampant use of pesticides, ecosystems damaged by fertilizer run-off, among others. A possible solution to the problems caused by current agriculture practices and the increasing food demands of the world’s growing population, she suggests, is a combination of sustainable organic farming practices with genetically engineered (GE) plants.
One of the most interesting and dramatic examples that Dr. Ronald gave of the benefits of GE plants was the generation of submergence tolerant strain of rice. Rice normally grows and thrives in areas with high average rainfall. However, some of those areas are prone to flooding. Rice seedlings submerged for 2 to 3 days die, leading to poor rice yields and starvation in the affected communities.
However, one strain of rice that could survive for 2 weeks while submerged was found in India. Dr. Ronald’s laboratory identified a set of submergence resistance genes that conferred survival. Transfer of one of those genes to a susceptible rice strain yielded a strain of rice that yielded 5 to 6 times more rice in flooded conditions, as compared to the parental strain.
The list of such examples is long, including a researcher who saved the Hawaiian papaya industry by engineering generated a virus-resistant strain of papaya using a version of RNA interference, as well as golden, beta-carotene enhanced rice that can save populations vitamin A deficiency and subsequent blindness and/or death.
There is, unfortunately, a lot of public resistance and fear surrounding GE crops, perhaps due in part to a lack of understanding and a general distrust of all things too sciencey. GE crops are not considered organic, which I find terribly confusing since they can be farmed using organic practices. They are labeled with scary and misleading labels and banned in whole countries in Europe and parts of California. Do GE crops deserve such harsh handling? Likely not. Do they serve as very cool examples of science translating into real life and making a difference? Definitely. Is there a need for them in the world? Absolutely.
Whatever the cause of the distrust and distaste for GE crops, I hope that opinion changes soon allowing golden rice and other GE crops to be planted. I also hope this happens before the planet is no longer able to sustain the levels of food production necessary to feed everyone.
P.S. I recorded the talk, so please let me know if you would like an audio of the lecture.