Golden Rice: concept, development, and its availability to developing countries

The "Golden Rice" project was, from the beginning, conceived as a humanitarian project with the idea of exploring genetic engineering technology for its potential to contribute to a reduction in vitamin-A malnutrition in developing countries by complementing traditional interventions. To achieve this goal, a series of challenges had to be met, extending far beyond normal scientific concepts. To be able to transfer the technology, in case of success, free of charge and limitations, care was taken to carry out the project within the public domain and with public funding only. The scientific challenge - to engineer the biochemical pathway into rice endosperm - was considered unfeasible for numerous good reasons and Golden Rice became finally possible only thanks to the coincidence of uncommon circumstances : (1) a most fruitful collaboration between two research teams with complementing expertise - that of Professor Peter Beyer, Freiburg, Germany, and that of the author. P. Beyer contributed the necessary scientific expertise and the author the engineering skills and determination to carry the project through against better knowledge, (2) long-term stable funding, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and from The Rockefeller Foundation, and (3) good fortune with the underlying biology of the rice endosperm and the final choice of the transgenes. Golden Rice - accumulating provitamin A in the endosperm to concentrations that may be sufficient to prevent vitamin-A deficiency on the basis of daily diet of 200 g of rice - is now available with "freedom-to-operate" for "humanitarian projects," defined as income below $10,000, in collaboration with bonafide public research institutions in developing countries, thanks to the generous donation of free licenses from the ag-biotech industry. It will be made available to resource-poor farmers free of charge for the trait as soon as appropriate local varieties have been developed and have received "deregulation" from the national bioregulatory authorities. The humanitarian "Golden Rice" project is guided across all the numerous genetically modified organism-specific hurdles by a Humanitarian Board and is further advanced to local varieties within an international Golden Rice Network involving public rice research institutions in the major rice-consuming countries. Financial support for the project comes from national governments and is attracted on a case-by-case basis, and, where necessary, from international altruistic organizations.