concluding experiment of a Chinese post-
doc. When the harvest from a co-transfor-
mation experiment involving five genes
was finished, the offspring from a trans-
genic line harboring all genes segregated
for white and yellow endosperm. This
was in February 1999 and two months
before my retirement.
Great recognition but no support for
completion from the public domain.
We presented our success to the public
at my ETH-Farewell Symposium on
March 31st 1999 and it was finally pub-
lished inScience[see Ye et al. (2000)].
Nature refused our earlier submitted
manuscript for publication because
they lacked interest, but the scientific
community, the media, and the public
were quite interested, even became
exited about this vitamin A rice.TIME
Magazine devoted a cover story on
Golden Rice July 31, 2000, and there
were hundreds of articles and airings in
the media. The readers of Nature
Biotechnologyvoted Peter Beyer and me
as the “most influential personalities in
agronomic, industrial, and environmental
biotechnology for the decade 1995
to 2005” [Nature Biotechnology
24 :291–300 (2000)] and there were
numerous recognitions for the work
from the scientific community and the
pubic. However, nowhere in the public
domain could we find support for the
long and tedious process of product
development for our humanitarian
Golden Rice project.
The private sector helped us to continue
with the humanitarian project.Only
thanks to the establishment of a
public-private partnership with Zeneca/
Syngenta we could [could we] proceed.
The basis was an agreement, in which we
transferred the rights for commercial
exploitation in return for support for the
humanitarian project—making Golden
Rice freely available to the poor in
developing countries. This public-private
partnership helped also to solve the next
big problem: getting permission to use all
intellectual property rights involved in
the technology. We had been usingintellectual property of 70 patents belong-
ing to 32 patent holders! Fortunately, 58
patents were not valid in our target
countries, and of the remaining 12, 6 of
these belonged to our partner company
and for the rest, it was not a big problem
to get free licenses. Product development,
de-regulation, and delivery of a GMO-
product turned out to be a gigantic task,
especially for two naı ̈ve university pro-
fessors. We needed advice from the
private sector and received help from
Dr. Adrian Dubock who works for
Syngenta. We were short in different
areas of expertise for strategic decisions
and established a Humanitarian Golden
Rice Board. We needed GMO-competent
partner institutions in our target countries
and established a Golden Rice Network.
And we needed managerial capacity and
found a project manager and a network
coordinator. For more details please visit
http://www.goldenrice.org.Lost years because of over-regulation.
If it were not a GMO, Golden Rice
would have been in the hands of the
farmers since 2003. We have lost 6–7
years in the preparatory adoption to
regulatory requirements, which all do
not make any sense scientifically.
An example for how irrational regulat-
ory authorities operate could be found
in our experience with a permission for
small-scale field testing of Golden
Rice. No ecologist around the world
has been able to propose any serious
risk for any environment from a rice
plant containing a few micrograms of
carotenoids in the endosperm, and this
trait does not provide for any selective
advantage in any environment. We still
(Spring 2007) have not been given
permission to field test Golden Rice
in the field in any Asian country!
Because of the requirements of the
established “extreme precautionary
regulation” in costs and data, we have
to base all Golden Rice breeding work
and variety development on one single
selected transgenic event. This event
selection will be completed in 2007
and from then on our partner institutions214 GENES AND TRAITS OF INTEREST FOR TRANSGENIC PLANTS