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Every year, vitamin A deficiency inflicts between 250,000 and 500,000 helpless and malnourished young people with early-life blindness and in half of those cases, it also brings death. Now the Washington Post reports that, backed by nearly $10 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, scientists are now working to genetically engineer "super" bananas that are fortified with crucial alpha- and beta-carotene, which the body converts to vitamin A. "There is very good evidence that vitamin A deficiency leads to an impaired immune system and can even have an impact on brain development," says James Dale. "Good science can make a massive difference here by enriching staple crops such as Ugandan bananas with pro-vitamin A and providing poor and subsistence-farming populations with nutritionally rewarding food."
The Gates Foundation has a history of supporting GMO research and technology at least since 2010, when the non-profit invested in a low amount of shares in biotechnology giant Monsanto. Gates has amped up support for GMOs so that "poor countries that have the toughest time feeding their people have a process," adding that "there should be an open-mindedness, and if they can specifically prove [GMO] safety and benefits, foods should be approved, just like they are in middle-income countries." Such support has resulted in criticism and suspicion of the foundation's agenda. As for the worry that GMO seeds are increasingly consolidated in the hands of major agribusiness powers, Gates said in February 2013 after his foundation reportedly sold the approximately $23 million in Monsanto shares it owned that there are "legitimate issues, but solvable issues" with GMO technology and wider use. Gates added that one solution may be offering crops already patented but requiring no royalty dues.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday June 20 2014, @12:33AM
Sorry, but it's not that distinct. Bananas aren't Plantains. Both are staples of the diet in many countries.
OTOH, while it's nice that the nutritional quality of bananas is being improved, what's really needed is a variety that's immune to the various fungi that tend to kill the plants. And since most bananas are clones of each other, if one is susceptible, then they all tend to be. There's currently a fungus spreading from country to country that is making bananas more and more difficult to grow, with it being a good chance that the currently most common variety will ALL be killed off. And this has happened before around 1930, when the then most popular banana strain was killed off by a newly evolved fungal variation.
The problem is, the seeds go all down the center of the banana, so if you were to re-create it's ability to reproduce sexually, they bananas would be a lot less edible. (That would probably be doable, as I believe that there are wild strains still extant that *do* reproduce sexually. But nobody would want the result.) So the banana depends on people to create variation and spread varieties. And most of them are grown with a lot of fungicides...to which the fungus keeps evolving resistance.
To me the ideal solution seems to be to modify the plants to reproduce sexually, but with an environmental trigger than can suppress the formation of seeds. This would, of course, be a major effort in biology. Perhaps Gates current effort is a step along the way to that. But given his history I wouldn't bet on anything so worthwhile. And my skepticism extends to wondering whether is separation from Monsanto is anything more than pro forma. This is, of course, unfair to him on my part, as I don't know how he could prove that he has reformed. But it is based upon his past deceitful actions, so it's not ungrounded. Being "fair" to someone like his is a way to get your head handed to you in a basket.
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