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By ANDREW POLLACK
The biotechnology industry will be different in at least one way in 2005: it will be without its longtime voice in Washington.
Carl B. Feldbaum, who has been president of the Biotechnology Industry Organization since it was formed in 1993, is retiring. He will be replaced on Jan. 4 by James C. Greenwood, now a Republican congressman from Pennsylvania.
The transition comes at a crucial time for the industry. The Food and Drug Administration is under intense pressure from critics who accuse it of having been too lax about drug safety. Politicians are howling about high drug prices. And controversies continue over subjects like stem cell research.
Mr. Feldbaum, 60, went to Washington 31 years ago as an assistant to Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor. Later he served in the Departments of Defense and Energy and as chief of staff for Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania. That gives him some experience in reading the political tea leaves.
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LONDON (Reuters) - Colombian drug lords have developed a genetically modified "cocaine tree" that contains higher drug levels and is resistant to herbicides, the Financial Times newspaper said on Tuesday.
Drug producers received help from foreign scientists to develop the leafier strain of plant, which grows to 9 feet, twice the height of the normal shrub, the newspaper said, citing a Columbian police intelligence dossier.
"In their search for greater profits, drug-traffickers appear to have entered the world of genetically-modified crops," the dossier was quoted as saying.
The tree yields eight times more cocaine than the normal shrub, and due to its size and sturdiness is more resistant to herbicides - one of Colombia's main weapons in the war on drugs.
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BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters) - Giant coca plants said to resist herbicides and yield eight times more cocaine may be due to extra fertilizer, not a drug cartel's genetic modification program, a scientist said on Tuesday.
A Colombian police intelligence dossier quoted in the Financial Times said smugglers apparently received help from foreign scientists to develop a herbicide-resistant tree that yields eight times more cocaine than normal shrubs.
But a toxicologist who studied the plants for the police said he knew of no evidence that showed whether the plants were genetically modified or merely grew big because they received an unusually large amount of fertilizer.
"Up to now there is no scientific evidence, at least in our country, which shows this is the consequence of genetic manipulation," said toxicologist Camilo Uribe.
"They could simply be the result of an excess of fertilizer," he said.
A few isolated giant plants had been found in areas including Colombia's Sierra Nevada and Macarena mountains, he said.
The United States has provided more than $3 billion of mainly military aid to back a crop spraying program that the Colombian government says has cut the country's coca-growing area by almost two-thirds.
Washington dismissed media reports of genetically modified coca in August.
"We regularly hear rumors that narcotraffickers are working to create a transgenic form of coca, but there is no scientific proof that they have undertaken such research," Phyllis Powers, Director of the Narcotics Affairs Section of the U.S. Embassy in Bogota, said at the time.
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Some Colombian drug growers are using genetically modified coca "trees" to boost cocaine production dramatically, government officials say.
Anti-drug operatives say they found new strains with yields eight times higher than normal coca plants.
Higher yields could help explain why cocaine prices have stayed low despite US and Colombian air attacks on farms.
Colombian scientists and US officials expressed doubts, claiming extra growth could be achieved using fertiliser.
The coca "trees" can stand over 2m tall (6ft 6in) and produce four times as much of the alkaloid active in cocaine, according to a dossier seen by Britain's Financial Times newspaper.
Although official Colombian figures claim that the area under coca cultivation has halved since 2000, evidence suggests that coca planters have managed to maintain a net level of cultivation.
German Manga, an assistant to the Colombian vice-president, told the BBC that planters were using new and sophisticated technology to maintain their levels of production.
The leaked dossier said a new variety of coca plant had been discovered by anti-narcotics officers in the remote Sierra Nevada region of northern Colombia.
"In their search for greater profits, drug-traffickers appear to have entered the world of genetically modified crops," the dossier said.
Among the coca plants judged to have been genetically enhanced is one variety which grows up to 2.7m (9ft) tall - double the usual size.
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ST. LOUIS, Dec. 8 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- In a presentation to investors today, Monsanto Company's (NYSE: MON) Chief Technology Officer Robert T. Fraley, Ph.D., will discuss how the company's significant experience with product development, the regulatory environment, and commercial strategy in biotechnology has given Monsanto a leadership position in guiding next-generation products to commercial reality.
Fraley is delivering a presentation as a part of the 15th Annual Chemical Conference sponsored by Smith Barney Citigroup in New York.
"There's an experience curve to agricultural innovation, whether it's breeding or biotechnology," said Fraley. "From the initial laboratory breakthrough to getting the right seed varieties in the right bags for farmers, there is a complex, interwoven process.
"With the success of the first round of biotechnology traits, we've established that we can succeed with that whole process -- something we believe is a terrific advantage in making decisions about how we invest in the next generation of products."
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Fraley's presentation to the 15th Annual Chemical Conference begins at 2:30 p.m. EST today. His presentation slides and a simultaneous audio webcast of the presentation will be available through Smith Barney Citigroup's web site at: http://www.veracast.com/webcasts/sbcitigroup/chemical-2004/85210119.cfm . Also, direct links to the conference-sponsored webcast of Fraley's presentation will be available by visiting the company's web site at http://www.monsanto.com and clicking on "Investor Information."
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HONG KONG (Reuters) - Scientists in Hong Kong and China said on Wednesday they have developed a test to detect bird flu infections in humans within hours, which could give health officials an important tool for controlling the killer virus.
The new rapid diagnostic kits can confirm H5N1 infections in people or animals within two hours, scientists from China's Shantou University and Xiamen University and the University of Hong Kong told a news conference.
Previous tests used to take three to five days and sometimes more than a week.
The new tests are also the first ever for the H5N1 virus that can be done outside of the laboratory and used at the sites of an outbreak, such as in animal markets, farms, hospitals or even in homes, the scientists said.
"These techniques are convenient, rapid, and are easy for non-specialists to use," said Guan Yi, a professor at the University of Hong Kong who led the research team.
"Its accuracy is about 90 percent," he added.
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MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico is cracking down harder on the illegal loggers who are razing the nation's forests, including a prized butterfly reserve that draws thousands of tourists each year.
Environment Minister Alberto Cardenas said on Tuesday that Mexico arrested 103 people in 129 forest raids over the past six months -- compared to just 31 arrests in all of 2003 -- and secured the equivalent of 1,530 truckloads of illegally harvested lumber.
The ministry, which estimates Mexico is losing 1.3 million acres of forest each year, will also use its bigger budget to step up surveillance in 2005 using helicopters, small planes, satellite images and troops, and will start using a nationwide database.
"We are expanding the scheme and making use of information and experience from 2004, and we will advance, on the path to 2006, toward the elimination of illegal logging," Cardenas told a news conference.
Mexico, a net importer of lumber, has been fighting for years against organized gangs of illegal loggers that are thinning out its jungles and forests -- regarded as precious national heritage as well as home to a key commodity -- and terrorizing local peasants.
In a country where kidnappings and carjackings are run of the mill, the illegal timber trade is equally ruthless. The gangs are frequently armed and work at night to avoid detection, often forcing indigenous locals into selling their trees.
They have also attacked police, government inspectors and journalists, built roadblocks to retake confiscated wood and stormed jails to free workmates, according to media reports.
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Erik Stokstad
On 6 November, plant pathologist Ray Schneider of Louisiana State University AgCenter gave a routine tour of the research fields near Baton Rouge to a visiting soybean farmer. "I offered to show him diseases he probably didn't have in Illinois," Schneider recalls saying. Both got a shock. In the course of the tour, Schneider came across signs of a disease never seen before in North American fields: the devastating fungal disease called soybean rust.
Schneider alerted the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) and FedEx'ed samples to a USDA lab in Beltsville, Maryland. When DNA tests came back positive on 9 November, APHIS sent in its soybean rust SWAT team the next day. Four groups of plant pathologists then fanned out across the state, surveying fields in 14 counties. Samples from four came back positive. Within days, APHIS had detected soybean rust in Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida.
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Unfortunately, the invader is the most aggressive kind of soybean rust, Phakopsora pachyrhizi. The spores are thought to have blown in with September hurricanes from South America, where farmers have incurred huge costs from fighting the disease. "In my country, we have two eras," says Alvaro Almeida, a plant pathologist at the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture, EMBRAPA Soja, in Londrina, "before the arrival of soybean rust and after." The good news for the United States is that almost all soybeans had already been harvested this year, and researchers have a few months to refine their plans. This week, top experts are gathering at a USDA conference in Baltimore, Maryland.
Work is already under way, as infection has long been seen as inevitable: Every major soybean-producing area of the world except North America has the fungus. Over the past few years, plant epidemiologists have created computer models to predict its arrival and spread. Others have been working out ways to track the disease from airplanes and satellites. USDA researchers have been testing the efficacy of various fungicides in countries already infested and screening germ plasm for signs of resistance that could be bred or genetically engineered into commercial varieties. "We're throwing everything we can at this," says molecular biologist Reid Frederick of USDA's Agricultural Research Service (ARS) in Fort Detrick, Maryland.
The best defense, however, would be a soybean variety that resists rust. That has been a challenge to researchers. For starters, the pathogen can't be cultured. A sequencing effort launched in 2002 hit snags when the genome turned out to contain at least 700 million base pairs--14 times larger and much more difficult to assemble than expected. And because APHIS considers soybean rust a bioterrorism "select agent," it must be studied at biosafety level-3 greenhouses, located only at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
Frederick and others there have been evaluating the most commonly planted varieties and their ancestral stock. All of the roughly 1000 lines tested so far have proved highly susceptible to soybean rust.
Resistance traits could also come from other plants. This year Frederick and Marcial Pastor-Corrales of ARS tested 16 varieties of common beans (Phaseolus vulgaris), such as pinto and black beans, and found that five were much more resistant to the pathogens than were soybeans. If those resistance genes can be cloned, they could potentially be genetically engineered into soybean.
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