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Oct 13, 2004 9:19 AM
Agricultural Research Service committed $24 million in fiscal 2004 for biotechnology risk assessment and risk mitigation research, covering such issues as allergenicity of GM foods to ways to block movement of genes from GM crops to non-GM crops.
By Hembree Brandon
There they stand in the public square, in their white biohazard suits, gas masks in place, protesting against genetically modified crops in Europe.
Heaven only knows how much time and effort environmental activist groups have spent over the past several years opposing crops and food products containing GMOs. Europe particularly has been a hotbed of opposition to this technology, resulting in an avalanche of sensationalistic media coverage and even destruction of crop plots and research facilities by eco-terrorists.
But the first chink has been made in their armor.
In late September, officials of the European Union approved both the sale and planting of 17 strains of genetically modified corn in every one of its 25 member states.
A Friends of the Earth spokesperson said the EU is attempting to force more genetically modified foods onto the market and “is caving in to the bullying of the United States… against the will of the European public.”
But the barn door is open, and as more and more evidence accrues that GM crops are safe, the average consumer will — as has been the case in the United States — accept them as yet another step in the use of technology to make agriculture more efficient and productive and to insure an adequate world food supply.
At about the same time as the EU decision, representatives to a conference in Africa were debating, yet again, the GMO crops issue. There were all the tired platitudes about greedy multinational corporations putting poor, small farmers out of business, unfair competition, loss of markets, environmental safety, exaggerating the benefits of GMOs for economic, political, and social reasons, and blah, blah, blah.
It was all put in perspective, however, by a delegate from Mauritia who declared: “It’s a fantastic technology. All new technology comes with some risk. Our challenge is to contain the risk.”
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By Irwin Arieff
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - A coalition of 125 scientific and patients' groups urged the United Nations on Wednesday to reject a global ban on stem cell research sought by the Bush administration and more than 50 other countries.
At an emotional news conference, scientists evoked the memory of paralyzed "Superman" actor Christopher Reeve, an ardent campaigner for stem cell research who died on Sunday at 52, while individuals with a range of diseases pleaded with the world body not to take away their hope for a cure.
A committee of the 191-nation U.N. General Assembly is scheduled to open debate on Oct. 21 on the drafting of a treaty on human cloning, an issue pending in the assembly since 2001.
All 191 U.N. members agree on a treaty that would prohibit the cloning of human beings. But they are sharply divided over whether to allow the cloning of human embryos for stem cell or similar research, known as "therapeutic cloning."
Supporters of a broad global treaty banning all forms of cloning, led by the United States and Costa Rica, view therapeutic cloning as the taking of human lives.
But advocates of the use of cloned human embryos for research say the technique holds out the hope of a cure for hundreds of millions of people with a wide range of diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer's, diabetes and spinal cord damage.
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By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
For the first time, researchers say, a vaccine against malaria has shown that it can save children from infection or death.
The vaccine, tested on thousands of children in Mozambique, was hardly perfect: It protected them from catching the disease only about 30 percent of the time and prevented it from becoming life-threatening only about 58 percent of the time.
But because malaria kills more than a million people a year, 700,000 of them children, even partial protection would be a public health victory. The disease, caused by a parasite carried by mosquitoes, is found in 90 countries, and drug-resistant strains are spreading.
Dr. Allan Schapira, strategy coordinator for the Roll Back Malaria campaign at the World Health Organization, said the trial was "good news, and definitely of great interest for malaria control."
The director of the Malaria Vaccine Initiative, which is underwriting tests on 15 experimental vaccines with money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said the GlaxoSmithKline product tried in Mozambique was now its leading candidate and had proved that the concept worked.
"We'd all like to see the numbers be higher, absolutely," said Dr. Melinda Moree, director of the initiative. "But these are still very significant findings."
The results - to be published tomorrow in the British medical journal The Lancet - were comparable to or better than other methods of preventing infection in African villages, like distributing mosquito nets and insecticides, she said.
[much text omitted]
Until the Gates foundation arrived, work on vaccines for tropical diseases had languished for decades because they make little profit for drug companies. (The world spends about $400 billion a year on drugs, but only about $8 billion on vaccines.) The American military, which also does malaria research, had limited amounts of money for it.
The Glaxo vaccine, known as RTS,S/AS02A, has been in development and testing for 17 years, said Dr. Joe Cohen, one of its inventors. It fuses a bit of hepatitis B virus with a bit of the falciparum strain of the parasite, which is the most common, and usually the most deadly, form of malaria. The piece of the parasite is from the life stage that is injected by mosquitoes, so antibodies and white blood cells stimulated by the vaccine attack before the parasite can settle in the liver and reproduce.
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By Wagdy Sawahel
Scientists in Egypt have produced drought-tolerant wheat by transferring a gene from barley into a local wheat variety.
The researchers, at Cairo's Agricultural Genetic Engineering Research Institute (AGERI), say their technique reduces the number of irrigations needed from eight to one, and that the wheat could be cultivated with rainfall alone in some desert areas.
The AGERI team hope to develop their technique and address biosafety issues in order to commercialise the transgenic wheat seeds as the first genetically modified (GM) product on the Egyptian market.
The research findings, which have been accepted for publication in the journal Physiologia Plantarum, were presented last month at a symposium on applied biotechnology in Egypt organised by AGERI and the Egyptian Centre for Biotechnology Information.
Water stress caused by drought is a major factor limiting plant growth and crop productivity worldwide. The researchers showed that by transferring a gene called 'HVAI1' from barley to wheat, the plants could tolerate low water levels for longer before their leaves wilted.
Following laboratory tests, the GM wheat was tested in greenhouse and field trials. The field trials were conducted for three seasons, starting in 2001-2002.
During the 2002-2003 season, Ahmed Bahieldin, the plant geneticist who led the research, and his colleagues compared the growth of the GM wheat and a local variety under normal rainfall conditions, without irrigation. The GM plants were taller and had higher yields than the non-modified plants.
"Now we are transferring the gene for drought tolerance to other local wheat varieties using traditional plant breeding programmes," Bahieldin told Scidev.net. "In future, GM wheat plants with improved drought tolerance could be incorporated into breeding programmes throughout the Mediterranean region."
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GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- A team of University of Florida researchers has created tiny hybrid particles that can speedily root out even one isolated E. coli bacterium lurking in ground beef or provide a crucial early warning alarm for bacteria used as agents of bioterrorism and for early disease diagnosis.
The study will appear this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"Our focus is the development of a bionanotechnology that combines the strengths of nanotechnology and biochemistry to generate a new type of 'bionanomaterial,' which has some unique properties," said Weihong Tan, a UF Research Foundation professor of chemistry and associate director of UF's Center for Research at the Bio/Nano Interface. "Because of these properties, we're able to finish the detection of a single bacterium in 20 minutes."
Bionanotechnology is a new frontier of research that combines two seemingly incompatible materials – the building blocks of life and synthetic structures – at a tiny, molecular-sized scale. Nanotechnology works with objects that are on the order of 1 to 100 nanometers; a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter, about the size of several atoms. When combined with molecular biology, the possible applications of this nano-frontier are widespread and sound like the stuff of science fiction. Scientists currently are designing microscopic "nanobots", bioprobes and biosensors that, once implanted in the human body, could perform a number of medical duties, from delivering drugs to detecting malignant cells.
Tan's compound materials are called "bioconjugated nanoparticles," a prefix-heavy term that highlights their blended nature. "It's a very simple idea," said Tan. He takes antibodies -- molecules used to seek specific types of bacteria -- and attaches, or "conjugates", them to tiny dye-loaded particles.
"A bioconjugated particle is linked to the antibody, which can recognize a specific type of bacterium," Tan said. "Inside this particle, we put many fluorescent dye molecules in such a way that you can generate a very, very high signal." Once a particle finds the bacteria that it's designed to seek, it glows.
Dye-labeled antibodies are commonly used to locate bacteria in a sample, but traditional methods are not very sensitive -- the glow from one antibody-linked dye molecule just isn't easy to see, and that can create potential health risks. "Sometimes one bacterium makes the difference," Tan said
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Scholarships and a new fellowship bearing his name inspire new generations.
By JERRY PERKINS
REGISTER FARM EDITOR
Norman Borlaug, the Cresco farm boy who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work developing high-yielding wheat, always will be known as the "Father of the Green Revolution."
Borlaug, now 90 years old, is still trampling through experimental crop plots all over the world, still goading agricultural researchers to push for ever-higher crop yields, and still bullying government officials to get out of the way so their people can be fed.
Borlaug, the founder and guiding beacon for the World Food Prize, spoke Thursday at the opening session of this year's World Food Prize International Symposium, being held in Des Moines.
He expressed anger at those who he feels are standing in the way of progress in combating world hunger and optimism that the mission of ending hunger will, in the end, be accomplished.
After all, he was able to overcome staggering odds to introduce so-called "miracle wheat" into Pakistan and India in 1965 to stave off an impending famine.
But Borlaug's legacy will go beyond the high-yielding wheat he developed in Mexico 60 years ago that has been credited with saving a billion lives in Asia. His legacy, he believes, will be the young people he has taught and sent around the globe to feed a hungry world.
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Looking the Pandemic in the Eye
Martin Enserink
Researchers have no way of knowing what the next influenza pandemic will look like. But models and educated guesses are disconcerting Ask flu experts about their worst nightmare and they may tell you something like this. Somewhere in Asia, a new flu virus is born that's able to jump from one human to the next, yet is cloaked in avian proteins that human immune systems have never seen before. Laying low at first, the virus sickens and kills a small number of people, while it's getting better at the human-to-human transmission game. When authorities finally notice the expanding cluster of flu cases, the virus has already moved on. It takes advantage of flights that connect Asia's major cities to the rest of the world, popping up simultaneously in Sydney, Los Angeles, and London.
Hundreds begin to die, literally drowning as fluid fills their lungs. A stunned public demands a vaccine, drugs--anything--but no vaccine will be available for months, and antivirals are in short supply; the question is, who gets them? Panic and riots erupt while schools, businesses, and transportation systems are shutting down. Overcrowded hospitals start turning away desperate patients. There aren't nearly enough doctors and nurses to take care of the sick and dying, nor enough coffins. When the outbreak finally peters out 18 months later, more than 2 billion people have become ill, and more than 40 million are dead--twice the number claimed by AIDS in 25 years.
True, that's a worst-case scenario--but few experts dismiss it out of hand. After years of neglect, the threat of a new pandemic is back on the world's radar screen, beeping noisily. Public health experts, virologists, and disease modelers are struggling to envisage how fast it would spread, how many it would kill, what it would cost, and most of all, how best to fight it.
The efforts were spurred in part by severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), the planet's close brush with pandemic disaster last year. The SARS virus wasn't all that contagious, striking fewer than 9000 people before it was brought under control. But the world may not be so lucky next time. Nor does it take a newcomer like the SARS virus for a pandemic to occur. Most experts agree that flu strains now circulating can, and eventually will, spawn a new pandemic.
Predicting what it will look like means going out on a limb, however, because everything depends on which flu strain is the culprit and how virulent it is--two questions no one can answer. Still, researchers can crunch the numbers for a range of assumptions. They end up with a series of scenarios--from something quite benign to an "overwhelming and potentially catastrophic event," says Martin Meltzer, an economist and disease modeler at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia.
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In a move that has split the government, the Italian Council of Ministers has blocked a motion, put forward by the Agriculture Minister Gianni Alemanno, aimed at regulating the future introduction of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in Italy.
Following last month's decision by the European Commission to allow EU farmers to commercially grow up to 17 different types of genetically modified (GM) maize seeds, Mr Alemanno had proposed a law strictly regulating the planting of GM crops.
'There is still a lot to know on GMOs and if we show ourselves to be too flexible now, we might one day find ourselves in an ungovernable situation,' said the minister, explaining his cautious approach. 'We must also take into account that 12 Italian regions have declared themselves GMO-free,' he added.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, however, branded the measure 'illiberal' stating it violated citizens' liberties. As a result, the government is now split between those who feel the proposed measures are too strict and those who say GMOs go against the Italian tradition of biological products of quality.
Antonio Marzano, Minister for industry, has sided with Mr Berlusconi, stating that 'Italy cannot renounce on the development of GMOs', as has Giancarlo Galan, president of the Veneto region, who said in a statement: 'I think that scientific research can't and shouldn't stop. [...] Scientific research stops in front of nothing. If we don't do it here, someone else will do it somewhere else. If we don't do it in Europe, they will do it in Israel or Egypt. It is unstoppable.'
'The traceability of the product is what matters,' he added. 'We must demand to know what we are eating and drinking.' Altero Matteoli, the Environment Minister has also called for a less rigid decree.
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Denmark and Italy will use the EU Agriculture and Fisheries Council on 18 and 19 October to request the establishment of a European task force on genetically modified organisms (GMOs), said officials on 14 October.
The two countries, both traditional opponents of biotech foods, will contend that the EU needs a special task force to assist member states in deciding how their farmers should separate conventional, organic and GM crops.
'This task force would ensure that the collection and dissemination of information be coordinated in the EU and contribute towards identifying research requirements concerning co-existence,' states the Danish delegation to the EU in a note, endorsed by Italy, to be read at the Council meeting on 18 October.
The European Commission published guidelines on the coexistence of different crop types in July 2003 and left it up to national governments to create laws based on those guidelines. Denmark is one of the only countries to have done so.
Denmark and Italy both feel that in the absence of common EU rules, 'it is vital that common rules for coexistence be laid down' according to the Danish note.
It is expected that this request will win the backing of at least ten countries.
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