Scotland on Sunday

Scientists Hope Rice Will Give Taste Of GM Crops' Lifesaving Potential

Scientists keen to highlight the positive side of genetically modified food have developed a yellow rice that can help prevent blindness. The EU-funded project, known as Carotene Plus, has modified rice grains to naturally produce beta-carotene, a substance the body instantly converts into vitamin A.

This is a vital dietary component that prevents fatal childhood diseases including xeropthalmia, a crippling condition which is the main cause of childhood blindness and a significant health problem in the developing world.

The modification process has already been successfully trailed in rice, tomatoes and other cereals. The team behind the project, run by universities in London, Rome, Strasbourg, Freiburg, Seville, Hoheneheim in the Netherlands and Zurich, claims that such GM research can save lives.

"This is something very useful that is coming from GM crops. We have to be very careful about how we present it and there are a few more tests we have to do to see what effects the modification will have on other plants", said team member Stephen Godson.

Just by putting vitamin A into rice, a staple food for two billion people worldwide, the team hopes to massively reduce the global death rate of eight million infants a year. "Improving the vitamin A status among those eight million pre- school children reduces mortality by 23%, measles mortality by 50% and diarrhoeal disease mortality by 33%," said an EU spokeswoman.

Conventional efforts to cure the debilitating health problems caused by the vitamin deficiency are currently hampered because of the difficulty of distributing the expensive supplements to the remote areas of the world often worst hit.

According to Godson, the only by-product of the modification so far identified is the change in colour - more like that of a carrot whose sight enhancing properties it shares.

The EU experiments isolated the gene coding for the enzymes necessary to produce beta-carotene and then introduced it into the rice so that all future seeds would contain beta-carotene. The vitamin will also resist removal by the milling process used in many developing countries. Traditional milling shreds off the outer layers to remove a fatty layer that turns rancid when it is stored, but in the process also strips many nutritious compounds. Modifying the seed itself avoids this process, producing a trademark yellow flour.

The laboratory research, which the team are stressing has been carried out in full compliance with EU and national legislation, has only been conducted on short-grain rice, a type known as pudding rice in the UK, but according to a spokeswoman it is now being extended to the long-grain variety.

"We will use traditional breeding techniques to transfer the trait to rice varieties adapted to local conditions. Once the nutritional and environmental properties have been carefully examined, free access to the seed is to be given to subsistence farmers in developing countries," said the spokeswoman, adding that the research will be expanded to develop other crops including cereals that can treat people who eat them. "The aim is to develop functional foods by adding compounds known to have a positive effect on human health due to their anti-oxidant properties and their provitamin A character."

The announcement of the creation of lifesaving foods is being seen as a significant tool for those promoting the benefits of the controversial technology at a time when test sites for GM crops are being destroyed by environmental activists and the government has come under pressure to impose a moratorium on the development of the crops.

The opportunity to prevent disability and death, allied with other developments in genetic technology which do not involve importing foreign genetic code into an organism, have forced many people opposed to genetic modification to re-evaluate their position.

According to a scientific expert for Friends of the Earth, the organisation, one of the most vocal against the development of the 'Frankenstein foods', is now seeking more information about the advances before it will give a response.