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introducing several GM crops, Chinese political leaders hesitated. Protests from environmental groups, social science scholars and members of the public were heard around the country. The fear of losing international buyers might have played a part, and initial enthusiasm gave way to public opposition and a cooling in top leaders’ attitudes (Nat. Biotechnol. 28, 390–391, 2010). Some Chinese investigators are putting a posi-tive slant on development. “In a sense, it [slow-ing commercialization of GM] is a good thing because it will give us more time to develop a strong seed industry to compete with Western agricultural biotech giants,” says Qifa Zhang, a leading rice scientist at Wuhan-based Huazhong Agricultural University.

To shore up policymakers’ support for science-based policy, earlier this year, a group of leading researchers from the Beijing-based Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE) sub-mitted a scientific report to top Chinese lead-ers. Such reports had, in the past, received prompt state endorsement. Not this time. Top policymakers issued a belated and lukewarm response. This could have been related to the leadership transition scheduled last month, says Xiaoya Chen, a leading scientist and president of Shanghai Institutes of Biological Sciences under CAS. A smooth power transition, which takes place every ten years, is currently the top prior-ity and politicians may be reluctant to stir public opprobrium with issues like GM crops.

Without a push from the top, most pre-commercialization research projects cannot go ahead because the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture, under public pressure, does not issue permits for environmental release of GM crops. Research funding is suffering, too. The

During the summer, a furor erupted in China over an allegedly unethical trial involving Golden Rice tested in children. A news release from Greenpeace China accused scientists of using children as “guinea pigs,” prompting a nationwide outcry. The trial that caused the uproar was designed to test whether rice geneti-cally engineered to exhibit endosperm-specific expression of a phytoene synthase from daf-fodil (Narcissus pseudonarcissus) and a caro-tene desaturase (CrtI) from the soil bacterium Erwinia uredovora could be absorbed by chil-dren 6–8 years of age as a potential means to combat vitamin A deficiency. When the results, which showed that Golden Rice was as effec-tive as pure beta-carotene in oil and better than that available in spinach, were published online August 1 in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (96, 658–664, 2012), Greenpeace launched its smear campaign, formenting wide-spread public outrage.

The Golden Rice spat is the latest in a wave of protests erupting across southern Asia against GM products. In both China and India, the agbiotech sector previously enjoyed support from state officials, but recently the public mood has soured. The technology is now caught in the crosshairs of local politicians. At the same time, the media circus surrounding publication of a controversial French study has continued to stoke the flames of public opinion.

The Chinese state was once an aggressive pro-ponent of genetically modified (GM) food. In 2008, the state poured $3.8 billion into a 10-year R&D program on GM crops and animals. By 2009, China was on track to be the first to com-mercialize a pest-resistant version of the coun-try’s staple crop, Bacillus thuringiensis toxin (Bt) rice (Nat. Biotechnol. 28, 8, 2010), after state offi-cials issued safety cer-tificates. At the same time, a feed crop, a variety of maize that produces phytase to enable animals to bet-ter utilize phosphorus in feed was approved in 2009. Both approv-als had to be followed by additional pro-duction trials, which would have meant another five years for GM seeds to be avail-able for commercial purposes.

But finding them-selves on the brink of

GM phobia spreads in South Asia

Golden rice, engineered to produce ß-carotene to prevent vitamin A deficiency, compared with white rice.

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Commission calls for genomic privacyA US bioethics panel is calling for privacy protection in a new report released in October. The Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues (PCSBI) lays out a dozen new recommendations in its report “Privacy and Progress in Whole Genome Sequencing.” The overall goal is to strike a balance between encouraging genomic research to benefit human health, on the one hand, and protecting the privacy of those whose genome are being sequenced, on the other. The Commission stops short of recommending national standards, calling instead on federal and state officials to work together to “assure a consistent floor to protect privacy,” says PCSBI chair Amy Gutmann, who is president of the University of Pennsylvania. About half the states have laws that already provide “some protection.” Even if the US Congress were to set national standards, however, privacy protections are likely to remain a jumble at the international level, where genomic sequence data sharing is expected to expand. And as the cost of sequencing drops, it is “not a fantasy” to imagine organizations “surreptitiously” taking saliva or other specimens to determine DNA sequences and then using such information to exclude some individuals and perhaps also their family members from life or health insurance coverage, according to Gutmann. The commission recommends “fully informed consent” for all human genomic sequencing, thus excluding surreptitious sequencing and thereby protecting citizens whenever whole-genomic sequencing is undertaken, she says. Jeffrey L Fox

in brief

in their words“We have crossed some critical barriers but still need to do a lot of work to reach the final destination,” Nisar Wani, head of the Reproductive Biology Laboratory at Dubai’s Camel Reproduction Center.

Researchers in Dubai have established camel cell cultures in preparation for creating drug-producing transgenics. (SciDev.Net, 3 September 2012)

“This result knocked me off my chair,” Scott Halstead, an adviser to the Dengue Vaccine Initiative comments on the disappointing efficacy of Sanofi’s dengue vaccine, which only reached half the expected 70% protection. (Reuters, 12 September 2012)

“These pleas are a victory for the American public, in demonstrating the FDA’s commitment to investigating cases of individuals and businesses that prey on the sick and vulnerable with phony medical treatments,” FDA Special Agent Patrick Holland comments on the guilty pleas entered by two fraudulent stem cell investigators, Lawrence Stowe and Frank Morales, who were outed in 2010 by the US television show 60 Minutes. (60 Minutes Overtime, 13 September 2012)

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of the industry body ABLE (Association of Biotechnology-Led Enterprises). “The narrow thinking of our politicians under the influence of a few NGOs is really jeopardizing the country’s progress in agriculture,” adds Arvind Kapur an executive of Rasi Seeds, one of the first Indian companies to market Bt cotton. Padmanabhan fears the move will “deprive the country of a pow-erful technology option to cater to the needs of millions of children suffering from malnutrition.”

If implemented, the report’s recommenda-tions could slow down—and perhaps halt—much transgenic work, not just in private companies, but also in the public sector. In response, on October 9, the prime minister’s Scientific Advisory Council, chaired by C.N.R. Rao called for a “judicious blend” of traditional breeding and new technologies.

Until any formal policy decisions are made, it is unclear how damaging the report will be to the dissemination of GM technology in India, says Kottaram. Even before this report came out, the requirement to obtain a ‘no objection certificate’ from state governments was slowing down GM crop trials.

Despite the prevailing mood, the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), which currently funds research on some 30 GM crops, will maintain its support for the technology. “In fact, only recently [on August 29] we signed a deal with

is pro-GM, and scientists from the Department of Biotechnology, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and Indian Council of Agricultural Research, who also support the technology, were among those interviewed. Pushpa Bhargava, a biologist and founder- director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, who is opposed to GM was also interviewed.

India first embraced GM crops in 2002, allow-ing companies to produce and market cotton modified with the Bt gene using a technology owned by St. Louis–based Monsanto (Nat. Biotechnol. 20, 415, 2002). After a few years, public resistance began to rise, driven by activ-ists and NGOs, culminating with the morator-ium on Bt brinjal, despite the fact that the crop had been approved for commercialization.

The latest report to the Indian government is damning. The panel unanimously declared “after critically analyzing the evidence for and against” that there are better options available than GM crops for increasing food production. The cultivation of Bt cotton, widely regarded as a commercial success, was also dismissed as ben-eficial to industry and “only added to the miser-ies” of farmers (Nature 487, 8, 2012).

“The report is a big setback,” says Kottaram Narayanan, managing director of Metahelix Life Sciences in Bangalore and an executive

biggest impact is expected in 2014 when GM rice and GM maize biosafety licenses expire. “We are worried that the invalidity of biosafety licenses [for GM rice and maize] will dramati-cally postpone the commercialization pro-cess,” says a scientist at Huazhong Agricultural University, who spoke to Nature Biotechnology on condition of anonymity.

In India, politics have also become entangled in a radical about-face in GM crop commer-cialization. India was on the verge of marketing its first GM food—insect-resistant Bt brinjal (eggplant). But a political row erupted and Bt brinjal approval was placed under an indefinite moratorium. That was 2010 (Nat. Biotechnol. 28, 296, 2010) and since then public opposi-tion to GM foods has grown. On August 9, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Agriculture published a report urging the gov-ernment to stop all open-field GM trials and confine all research to greenhouses until the regulatory system is revamped. The report, spearheaded by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), was written by a panel of 31 members of Parliament after examining, according to the panel, over 1,400 documents and interview-ing scientists, civil society representatives and farmer organizations. Leading biochemists such as Govindarajan Padmanabhan at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, who

A scandal—cried French newspaper Le nouvel Observateur—following publication of a paper by Gilles-Eric Séralini from the University of Caen, in France, on a long-term study of the toxicity of GM maize. The study’s online publication on September 19 by Food and Chemical Toxicology prompted a media frenzy. The study made a bombshell claim, completely unprecedented in the literature: rats fed for two years on Monsanto’s NK603 corn expressing 5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate synthase (EPSPS),

cultivated with or without Roundup, and Roundup alone, develop a range of tumors. The authors claimed that the disruption of biosynthetic pathways that may result from overexpression of EPSPS in the GM maize can give rise to pathologies.

The study, said to have cost €3 ($3.9) million, was dismissed as scientifically unsound by numerous scientists with or without ties to the agbiotech industry. Both the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) lamented inadequate experimental design, poor analysis and data reporting. Writing on behalf of the European Federation

of Biotechnology, biotech pioneer Marc Van Montagu comments on the study. “This paper represents a dangerous case of failure of the peer-review system.” Van Montagu also lambasts the communication strategy of the authors. The publication was timed to coincide with a book on the experiment and a film to be broadcast on public television and in cinemas. Most unusually, an association representing Séralini offered interested journalists a confidentiality agreement to get early access to the paper that prevented signatories from approaching third-party researchers for comment, with a penalty of several million euros to be levied if the contract were breached. As a consequence, initial media coverage was almost ubiquitously noncritical.

Controversy soon followed when funding ties with several supermarket chains promoting non-GM positions were revealed; Séralini’s decision not to provide EFSA with additional unpublished data also did not help. “If the intention was to ‘manage’ the news, it wasn’t managed very well,” says Jonathan Amos from the BBC, which did not sign the confidentiality agreement. Despite the paper’s flaws, it seems likely that the initial coverage will negatively sway public and political opinion in France, where it seems to have hardened the socialist government’s already unfriendly stance toward GM organisms. Before the French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health & Safety (Anses) could deliver its opinion (expected by the end of October), the agriculture minister Stéphane Le Foll stated that long-term feeding studies should become mandatory for GM food crops, even if Séralini’s work is debunked. Anna Meldolesi Rome

Media leaps on French study claiming GM maize carcinogenicity

French opposition to GMOs seems set to increase.

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Australia’s Queensland University of Technology for promoting AGM banana [for enhanced iron content],” DBT secretary Maharaj Kishan Bhan told Nature Biotechnology. An indication that the government is serious about promoting GM research, if not products, also came with a cabi-

net announcement on August 23 to establish a Rs 2.87 billion ($54.1 million) research center dedicated to agbiotech at Ranchi.

Bhan says the report’s negative conclusions were likely prompted by the panel’s apprehen-sion that multinational companies are tak-

ing control of India’s seed business. “To allay these fears, we have to fast track our regula-tory policy for products made in India,” he suggests.

Killugudi Jayaraman Bangalore India and Hepeng Jia Beijing

Around the world in a month

CHILECompanies doing applied research will benefit

from a substantial R&D tax credit to boost research. From September, businesses will be able to claim in-house research as well as reduce tax bills by up to 35% of the amount invested in research.

ARGENTINAA new program to boost technological innovation and capacity building receives a

$200-million loan from the Inter-American Develop-ment Bank. SMEs in the agricultural, energy, health and climate-change areas will be a priority.

PUERTO RICOHundreds of individual residents provided donations to help fund the sequencing of

the Puerto Rican parrot (Amazona vittata), the only surviving parrot species native to the United States.

FRANCEA new modular facility for the large-scale production of cell-based medicinal

products launches near Paris. The €110 ($144)-million initiative aimed at developing a local cell therapy industry was set up by the C4C project, a consortium of the biotechs LFB, Celogos and CleanCells, seven public sector institutions and the state innovation agency OSEO.

DENMARKLeo Pharma sets up a series of long-term collaborations with clinical researchers at Berlin’s Charité University Hospital to

discover new treatments for skin conditions including psoriasis and actinic keratosis.

By contrast, the African continent is overcoming its initial apprehensions about GM crops, prompted by skepticism in the European export market and by the activities of NGOs. Earlier this year, Ghana’s recently established National Biosafety Committee received three applications from scientists to conduct research and field trials on GM crops, one for cowpea and two for sweet potato.

If these applications are approved, Ghana will become the seventh African country cultivating GM crops. Currently, however, only three African countries—Burkina Faso, Egypt and South Africa—grow GM crops commercially. Seed sales in South Africa, the biggest producer of GM crops in Africa, show that Bt maize and Roundup Ready soybean make up about two-thirds of maize and soybean sales, and all cotton seed sales are of Bt cotton.

Although few African countries are planting GM varieties, nearly 20 nations have fully fledged biosafety regulations. Diran Makinde, the director of the African Biosafety Network and Expertise (ABNE) says many francophone countries adopted laws based on the precautionary approach endorsed by the European Union. These made those planting GM crops—whether companies or research

institutes—liable for any harm resulting from it, which meant nobody was willing to take the risk.

Currently, only a very few countries are opposed outright to GM. The only African country with a straight-up moratorium is Benin, whereas Angola simply says it is not interested. But there is still plenty of resistance to GM technology throughout Africa. The first concern is whether the technology itself is safe for humans and animals as well as for the environment. The second is fear that big agribusinesses will exploit poor farmers by controlling seed production.

These concerns are often put forward by activist groups, such as Biowatch South Africa and the African Centre for Biosafety, also based in South Africa, or international organizations like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace. As for the man on the street, his general understanding of the technology remains low. Misinformation abounds, says Andrew Kiggundu, a researcher at Uganda’s Kawanda Research Institute, based near Kampala. Uganda does not yet have a biosafety bill to regulate commercial growing of GM crops. But most Ugandans believe that the crops developed at the institute using biotech are GM varieties. Linda nordling Cape Town, South Africa

Opposition thaws for GM crops in Africa

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