Forum serves food for thought
By Joie Guner
Nov. 24, 2003 9:00 p.m.
By the year 2050, there will be 9 billion humans inhabiting the
world ““ a population that will require a 100 percent increase
in the production of food to stave of starvation.
A symposium on Friday entitled “Foods for the
Future,” organized by UCLA Extension in collaboration with
the David Geffen School of Medicine, addressed this issue among
others concerning the bioengineering of food
“This symposium is geared to educating the university
community and the public about trying to improve plants for human
health and nutrition,” said Robert Goldberg, co-coordinator
and professor in the department of molecular, cell and
developmental biology at UCLA.
Experts on this subject from around the country spoke on issues
ranging from oral vaccines, the enhancement of foods through
vitamins, and the elimination of allergens to regulation of
bioengineering foods and the benefit of such products to developing
countries.
Goldberg gave a presentation that mapped out the origins of
agriculture and its progress into modern day food. He showed how
humans have been genetically altering food to improve its quality
for 10,000 years. The improvement continues today.
With the advent of biotechnological gene modification,
scientists like Eliot Herman of the United States Department of
Agriculture have made far-reaching advances.
“You can use biotechnology to totally remove an intrinsic
food allergen which causes problems for very large numbers of
people,” Herman said in a speech at the symposium.
Herman uses suppression technology in order to clone allergen
genes and reinserts these genes into normal soybean plants.
Consequently, the plant gets irritated and thinks a virus is
invading, so it eliminates the proteins that cause allergies.
Channapatna Prakash, the director of the Center for Plant
Technology at Tuskeegee University, delivered a presentation on the
uses of bioengineered foods in developing countries.
“Many developing countries have a lot of malnourishment
because of a lack of certain vitamins and minerals in the crops
that they eat, such as rice,” Prakash said. “This
technology has potential for genetic fortification to boost the
level of vitamins and nutrients in the food.”
He cited the lack of vitamin A in the diet of many in developing
countries, which leads to blindness in half a million children each
year.
By bioengineering the vitamin A gene from carrots or daffodils
and putting it into rice, scientists take an enormous step toward
solving the problem.
Yet the major concern in developing countries is not solely the
lack of nutrition ““ it is the lack of actual food itself.
“(Biotechnology) can increase productivity on the farm by
cutting losses that we have already in developing countries due to
diseases and pests and weeds,” Prakash said.
“Technology has the potential to make our crops hardier by
trying to provide them with a level of insulation against these
factors,” he added.
However, Prakash said countries should implement biosafety
regulations that are “very science-based without too much
bureaucratic red tape” before bioengineered food can be
used.
Goldberg said that by sticking to a “science-based”
solution to the lack of nutrients and food in developing countries,
“miracle plants” can be created.
Such “miracle plants” could potentially be used as
oral vaccines, said Charles Arntzen, a professor at Arizona State
University ““Â a method preferred over needles by
organizations like the World Health Organization.
“The machinery of protein production in plants … is
slightly tweaked to cause a new protein to accumulate in plant
cells,” Arntzen said. “This new protein is designed so
that it acts as an oral vaccine when a dried sample of the plant is
consumed.”
These advancements can be hampered by activists who believe that
bioengineered food is poisonous or unhealthy, Goldberg said.
“The controversy with respect to genetic engineering and
plants will go down as the biggest hoax of the last part of the
20th century and the beginning of the 21st century because there
are no valid reasons other than ideology that would prevent any of
this stuff from going forward,” Goldberg said.
