LIFE BOX 8.2. INGO POTRYKUSIngo Potrykus, Chairman, Humanitarian Golden Rice Board and Network;
retired Professor in Plant Sciences, ETH Zurich
Ingo PotrykusRice-dependent poor societies are
vitamin A-deficient because rice is
their major source of calories, but
does not contain any pro-vitamin A.
Hundreds of millions in the developing
world, therefore, do not reach the 50%
level of the recommended nutrient
intake (RNI) for vitamin A, required to
live a healthy live. We developed
“Golden Rice” to provide pro-vitamin
A with the routine diet. Even with rice
lines containing modest concentration
of pro-vitamin A, a shift from ordinary
rice to Golden Rice in the diet could
save people from vitamin A malnu-
trition. Recent studies establish that
Golden Rice, if supported by govern-
ments, could save, at minimal costs, up
to 40,000 lives per year in India alone.
How did I get involved in science and
genetic engineering of plants?My con-
nection to biology dates back to my
childhood and is that of an old-fashioned
naturalist. Ornithology is, after 60 years,
still my major hobby. My interest in
molecular biology began only when I
was already around 40 years old. I got
fascinated by the phenomenon of totipo-
tency of somatic plant cells. Having an
engineer’s mind and being concernedabout the problem of food-insecurity of
poor people in developing countries I
could not resist of challenging that
potential of totipotency for contributing
to food security—and this let me into a
scientific career as pioneer in the area
of plant tissue culture and genetic
engineering. As research group leader
at the Max-Planck-Institute for Plant
Genetics, Heidelberg (1974–76), the
Friedrich Miescher Institute Basel
(1976–86), and full professor in plant
sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute
of Technology (ETH) (1986–99) I had
exceptional good conditions and great
teams to follow the basic concept of
developing genetic engineering technol-
ogy for crop plants such as cereals and
cassava. The task was to rescue harvests,
to improve the nutritional content, and to
improved exploitation of natural
resources. As long as active in academia
this was all “proof-of-concept” work.
Only with my retirement in 1999 and
the need for Golden Rice to be brought
to the poor did I realized that the deci-
sive follow-up steps of product develop-
ment and deregulation are routinely
ignored by academia.
The science leading to Golden Rice.
By the end of the 1980s we had trans-
formation protocols ready for rice and
had already worked on insect-, pest-,
and disease-resistance. The Rockefeller
Foundation alerted me of the problem
of micronutrient malnutrition. In 1991,
I appointed a PhD student to work
towards pro-vitamin A-biosynthesis in
rice endosperm and Dr. Peter Beyer, an
expert in terpenoid biosynthesis from
the university of Freiburg, Germany
joined as co-supervisor. The project
was, for numerous good reasons,
considered totally unfeasible and was,
therefore, difficult to finance. The break-
through came eight years later, with theLIFE BOX 8.2. INGO POTRYKUS 213