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By Anne Fitzgerald As U.S. farmers prepare for spring planting, seed production plants and warehouses are moving more bags of genetically engineered crop seed than ever.
Biotechnology has revolutionized the $30 billion global crop seed industry in the past 10 years, with Des Moines' Pioneer Hi-Bred International Inc. helping lead the way.
A decade ago, genetically engineered seeds were not available for farmers to buy. In 2004, they accounted for 5.4 percent of all seed planted globally, with more than half of one crop - soybeans - being raised from engineered seeds. ZOOM
Since they first hit the market in the mid-1990s, adoption has been highest in the United States. Last year, U.S. farmers planted biotech seed on nearly 118 million acres. That was 11 percent more than in 2003 and represented 59 percent of the world's biotech crop acreage in 2004.
Corn and soybeans - Iowa's main crops - have been leaders in the trend, and Pioneer has been on center stage.
Ten years ago, Pioneer had no genetically engineered seed on the market. Today, transgenic seed accounts for half of the plant genetics giant's annual sales. Agronomic traits, such as drought tolerance and corn rootworm resistance, are in the offing, and so are numerous nutritional benefits. Pioneer has developed soybeans with oil that does not require hydrogenation, a chemical process creating trans fats deemed harmful to human health by the federal government.
Pioneer's Nutrium soybean seed is available commercially this year for the first time.
Pioneer is contracting with farmers to raise the engineered soybeans, and officials hope that by 2007 farmers will raise about 700,000 acres, enough to produce 254 million pounds of trans-free oil. Pioneer also is working with food manufacturers to meet their specifications.
DuPont has partnered with Bunge Ltd., a multinational grain company that will serve as a direct link to food manufacturers, who are scrambling to find alternatives to hydrogenated soy oil.
Fyrwald described Pioneer's new soybean as "a very, very competitive option" for the food industry.
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Minimal reports from Laos and Cambodia and unreliable test results elsewhere suggest that the virus' progress has been underestimated.
By Charles Piller, Times Staff Writer
HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam — After more than a year of watching patients sicken and die of bird flu, Dr. Tran Tinh Hien of the Hospital for Tropical Diseases here thought he understood the illness.
Then last month, he learned of an unsettling study. Japanese researchers retested samples from 30 Vietnamese patients whose lab tests showed no signs of the disease. They discovered that seven had actually been infected.
"We are especially worried, because it may mean we missed some patients," said Tran, the hospital's deputy director.
Tran is part of a growing consensus that the extent of human bird flu infection in Southeast Asia may have been significantly underestimated.
In the last few months, scientists have begun to believe that the inaccuracy of laboratory tests, the wide variation of symptoms and the inability of public health agencies to combat the disease may have created the erroneous perception that bird flu is still rare among humans.
The number of infections is key. The more there are, the greater the chance the virus will mutate into a form that can easily be passed between people, who would have little immunity to the new disease. Scientists believe that nearly all infections so far have been caused by contact with sick or dead poultry.
Officially, the tally doesn't sound alarming. The virus has killed 14 people since December and 46 over the last 15 months. All but one of them were from Vietnam and Thailand. Altogether, there are 69 lab-confirmed cases, according to the World Health Organization.
Yet doctors and public health officials point to a glaring oddity in the statistics that underscores the belief that the case count is too low to be true.
Vietnam and Thailand have reported the overwhelming majority of recent cases. Yet Laos, which is sandwiched between the countries, has reported no cases among people or birds this year. Cambodia, which is also flanked by Vietnam and Thailand, has confirmed only a single human case.
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Genetically modified crops could be grown in the UK within 10 years, US biotechnology giant Monsanto has said.
Company president Hugh Grant told the BBC's Farming Today programme his firm's research showed that most UK farmers wanted the chance to grow GM.
Following a five-year national debate, the government said last year GM crops could be grown under strict conditions. But Friends Of The Earth says farmers are sceptical and consumers do not want the crops because of safety fears.
Monsanto, which pioneered GM crops, announced it would close its European seed cereal business in the UK in 2003.
Mr Grant told the programme he found the pace of change in Europe frustratingly slow and he rejected the view that UK consumers were worried about the safety of GM products. He said more than 400 million hectares (one billion acres) of GM crops had been planted around the world and farmers from China to Brazil were literally reaping the benefits.
He also insisted GM technology could be used to produce a range of crops with distinct health benefits.
However, Friends Of The Earth said biotechnology firms had been promising such "super crops" for years and had failed to deliver. It insisted more research was needed into the effects of GM food.
Spokeswoman Clare Oxborrow told BBC News: "Monsanto's predictions for GM in the UK are more about marketing hype than reality.
"People have genuine concerns about GM crops - about their impacts on our health, the environment and the fact that they are being promoted by multinational companies more interested in controlling the global food supply and making a profit than providing us with healthy food."
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CHICAGO (Reuters) - Kraft Foods Inc., which was at the center of a 2000 controversy over unapproved genetically modified corn finding its way into the food chain, on Monday said transgenic crops will gradually evolve to play an important role in nutrition and the environment.
"We believe that over time genetically modified ingredients will play a very important role both nutritionally and environmentally in terms of reduction of pesticide use around the world," Kraft Chief Executive Officer Roger Deromedi said.
He was speaking at the Reuters Food Summit in Chicago.
In the fall of 2000, Kraft pulled its Taco Bell brand taco shells from shelves across the United States after it was found that genetically modified StarLink corn -- approved for use only as feed for animals -- had been used in making the products.
ConAgra Foods Inc., the country's second-largest food manufacturer, soon after suspended milling operations at its corn processing plant in Kansas while it tested its supplies for StarLink corn.
Azteca Milling, a distributor to Mission Foods and other food makers, stopped shipping and milling yellow corn in September 2000, and voluntarily recalled some corn products.
More than four years after the StarLink incident, South Korea, one of the world's largest importers of corn, still requires certification from suppliers that the corn it is buying to make food products does not contain StarLink corn.
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CHICAGO (Reuters) - Biotech crop pioneer Monsanto Co. said on Wednesday it was unlikely any time soon to resurrect its project to develop genetically modified wheat, which it suspended last May.
The company instead would plow its resources into a conventionally bred variety of soybeans that will produce a cooking oil with a lower level of cholesterol-producing trans fatty acids.
"We saw what's going on with food and trans fats, and we saw that resource we are putting in wheat is not nearly as valuable as putting it into the food and oil side," Monsanto Executive Vice President Jerry Steiner told the Reuters Food Summit in Chicago.
Steiner said the soybeans will have low linolenic acid, reducing the need for partial hydrogenation of soybean oil. Hydrogenation is a chemical process that gives products a longer shelf life but creates trans fats.
Medical experts believe trans fats are more harmful to the heart than other forms of fat that have been linked to heart disease, such as animal fats.
Steiner said the soybeans would be grown on about 100,000 acres this spring in Iowa, adding that the crop could be planted on 5 million acres over the next four to five years -- about 7 percent of total U.S. soybean acreage.
The shifting of Monsanto's funds to the new variety of soybeans comes after the company shelved its project to develop a transgenic wheat amid a global outcry from consumers alarmed at the prospect of genetic engineering of a key food crop.
"Would we bring it back next year? It's highly unlikely," Steiner said of the genetically modified wheat.
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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The University of California at Los Angeles will spend $20 million over five years to establish a stem cell research institute and compete for new state funds to fight cancer and other diseases, university officials said on Wednesday.
UCLA will focus on research in three areas: HIV and AIDS, cancer, and neurological diseases like Parkinson's, said Dr. Owen Witte, a professor of microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics, who will head the unit.
UCLA is one of the first big California universities to get in line for research grants and loans to be issued under a $3 billion state program.
Meanwhile, two California state senators said on Wednesday they will introduce legislation and a constitutional amendment to protect taxpayer dollars in stem cell research, bar conflicts of interest, and require open meetings, among other steps.
"To maintain the public's confidence, the integrity of this important research and California's significant financial investment, we must make sure meetings are open to public scrutiny, strict conflict-of-interest and economic disclosure standards are developed, patients' rights are respected and the state receives a fair financial return on its generous investment," Sen. Deborah Ortiz, who chairs the Senate Health Committee, said in a statement.
California in November voted to spend $300 million a year of state bond money for 10 years to conduct stem cell research and to develop possible treatments and cures for a range of diseases like diabetes and Alzheimer's.
UCLA's Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Medicine will conduct embryonic and adult stem cell research, creating 12 faculty positions, and expanding laboratory space.
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One of the hurdles to using human embryonic stem cells to treat disease has been overcome. Three teams have managed to derive and grow the cells without using any animal cells that might contaminate them.
The hope is that embryonic stem cells (ESCs), the primitive cells in embryos from which all our tissues originate, can be grown into transplantable tissues for treating a multitude of disorders, from diabetes to osteoporosis. But until now it has been impossible to grow them without mouse "feeder cells" and animal-derived serum.
That means all existing ESC lines, including those approved for federally funded research in the US by President Bush, could be tainted with animal diseases or substances that would trigger transplant rejection (New Scientist print edition, 29 January).
Now, Paul De Sousa and his team at the Roslin Institute in Scotland, where Dolly the sheep was cloned, have produced what they say are the first animal-free ESCs. "We have cells that have never directly been exposed to animal products," De Sousa told a recent stem cell conference in Edinburgh, UK.
His team first isolated ESCs from spare human embryos donated by couples after IVF. The cells were placed on a layer of a purified human protein called laminin, the material that separates growing human cells from one another.
Next De Sousa added "feeder" layers of human neonatal foreskin cells, which provided the nutrients and growth factors usually supplied by mouse feeder cells. In all, De Sousa established four new cultures of human embryonic stem cells.
To keep the cells ticking over, he added additional growth factors and essential nutrients. Three cultures received extracts derived from cows, but the fourth was given a mixture composed purely of human substances. This, he says, is the first line of human ESCs not directly exposed to any animal products at any stage. He is preparing the results for publication.
He admits, however, that the foreskin cells had themselves been exposed to animal products during their production, so he cannot rule out the possibility of contamination.
Another team led by Carlos Simón of the IVI Foundation in Valencia, Spain, announced in Edinburgh that they have used very similar techniques to generate two new cultures of human embryonic stem cells. The only difference was that Simón's team grew the stem cells on human placental skin-like cells rather than the foreskin cells used by De Sousa. Simón's results appear in Fertility and Sterility (vol 83, p 246).
A team led by Robert Lanza at Advanced Cell Technology in Massachusetts, US, has gone further by producing human ESCs without using any feeder cells. This avoids any risk of animal or human viruses contaminating the stem cells, Lanza says.
His team grew human ESCs on the "extracellular matrix" residues left in a dish after mouse feeder cells are washed off. Lanza says that making the equivalent coating entirely from human ingredients is a formality.
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