Don’t Eat the Yellow Rice: The Danger of Deploying Vitamin A Golden Rice

What better way to discredit your critics than to rope in 107 naive Nobel Prize winners (all without relevant expertise) to criticize your opposition?

But such tactics are not new. Long ago, the GMO industry spent well over $50 million to promote “Golden Rice” as the solution to vitamin A deficiency in low income countries. They did so well before the technology was completely worked out, let alone tested. Let alone consumer acceptability tested. Let alone subjecting it to standard phase 2 and 3 trials to see if it could ever solve problems in the real world.

So why has this apparently straightforward scientific project not reached completion after so many decades?

Because the purpose of Golden Rice was never to solve vitamin A problems. It never could and never will. It’s purpose from the beginning was to be a tool for use in shaming GMO critics and now to convince Nobel Laureates to sign on to something they didn’t understand.

I worked with a conventional fortified rice technology (Ultra Rice) for years for the NGO PATH in...