BusinessWorld

Nobel Prize Winners Endorse Agricultural Biotechnology

Renowned US scientists James Watson and Norman Borlaug join more than 1,000 other scientists from around the world in endorsing the "Declaration of Scientists in Support of Agricultural Biotechnology."

Both are Nobel prize winners - Watson, a biologist, won the Nobel for medicine in 1962, while agronomist Borlaug won the Nobel peace prize in 1970.

The declaration, drafted by Prof. C.S. Prakash of Tuskegee University, calls biotechnology a "powerful and safe means for the modification of organisms" and says that biotechnology "can contribute substantially in enhancing quality of life by improving agriculture, health care and the environment."

Prof. Prakash says that "despite the nonsense being spread by anti-biotech activists, this technology can actually improve environmental conditions while helping to boost world food production."

Drafted recently, the scientists' declaration has attracted the signatures of over 1,000 scientists, including Gurdev Khush, rice breeder with the International Rice Research Institute and past winner of the World Food Prize; Ingo Potrykus, who developed the new "golden rice" with added beat carotene and iron; James Watson, who with colleague Francis Crick discovered the double helix structure of DNA and shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Medicine; Norman Borlaug, who is considered the "Father of the Green Revolution," and who developed many of the hybrid wheat varieties used to boost food production in Mexico during the 1950s to the 702.

Borlaug helped spread the Green Revolution in South American and Asia. Borlaug was awarded the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to increase world food production.

"There is no scientific reason to believe that genetically engineered foods are any less safe than the foods we've been eating for centuries," said Prof Prakash, "so we, members of the scientific community, felt it necessary to counter the unfounded attacks that anti-biotech activists are spreading about these products."

In the Philippines, a hundred scientists of various research institutions of the University of the Philippines Los Banos and the Department of Agriculture's Philippine Rice Research Institute (DA-PhilRice) expressed their support for the development of agriculture biotechnology in the country.

They also lauded the decision of the National Committee on Biosafety of the Philippines (NCBP) to approve the field testing of Bt corn.

They said that the approval of field tests opens opportunities for Filipino farmers and Filipinos in general to evaluate key technologies which can significantly contribute to the farming sector and society at large.