Prof. Ingo Potrykus

• 
  www.grain.org/briefings/?id=18 - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 9/21/1998    Last Visited: 3/11/2007  

  By inserting two genes from daffodil and one gene from a bacterium, Dr. Ingo Potrykus of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and Dr. Peter Beyer of the University of Freiburg in Germany have managed to engineer a beta-carotene pathway into Taipei 309, a japonica rice variety.
  ...
  The small handful of transgenic rice grains produced in Potrykus' laboratory provided a much-needed public relations boost for the biotech industry at a time when genetic engineering is under siege in Europe, Japan, Brazil and other developing countries.
  ...
  Dr. Potrykus initially approached Nestle, the world's biggest food company, for funding but was rejected.In retrospect, Dr. Potrykus describes this as "fortunate" because it kept the project open for public funding and the potential for free distribution3.But it was more of an afterthought than a plan.
  
  Despite being the result of public research, golden rice is enmeshed in around seventy patents owned by some thirty-two companies and institutions, according to the US-based International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA)4.Because of the complexity of licensing arrangements, the inventors ceded their rights to Greenovation, a biotech spin-off company from the University of Freiburg, which then struck a deal with AstraZeneca (now Syngenta).According to Dr. Potrykus, a veteran in dealing with multinational companies and an inventor of a number of patented technologies, forging an alliance with AstraZeneca seemed to be the only option available to gain "freedom-to-operate" and speed up the transfer of the technology to developing countries.
  ...
  The first ever genetically engineered insect resistant indica rice variety also came out of the lab of Dr.Potrykus in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH).In April 1995, Dr. Potrykus sent Bt rice seeds containing a gene owned by Ciba Geigy (now Novartis) to IRRI in the Philippines.
  ...
  According to Dr. Potrykus, agreements have already been established with several institutions in Southeast Asia, China, Africa and Latin America and are only awaiting submission of a written confirmation of the "freedom to operate" to the humanitarian board7.
  ...
  Last 19 January 2001, Dr. Potrykus arrived at IRRI with the golden rice, where scientists will start transferring the golden rice trait to commercial varieties.
  ...
  CGIAR's Technical Advisory Committee, IRRI should "Continue to campaign for GE as a legitimate breeders' tool, using the 'golden' rice as a flagship."17 In an interview with Dr. Potrykus, he said, "If some people decide that they want blind children and white rice, it's their decision.I'm offering the possibility of yellow rice and no blind children.
  ...
  14. Potrykus, I, Ingo Potrykus Response to Golden Rice Critics, AgBioWorld dated 28 June 2000, accessed through the web at http://www.biotechknowledge.com.

• 
  www.politicalfriendster.com/showPerson.php?id=5418&name - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 6/25/2007    Last Visited: 6/25/2007  

  Ingo Potrykus
  
  Potrykus was a member of the Board and he writes with the forward looking optimism of an IPO in outlining the greatness of the many groups involved in his ode to Golden Rice.
  ...
  ISPB featured expert and member of the Board of the Golden Rice Board, Ingo Potrykus, Professor Emeritus, ETH Zurich, Switzerland; Member of Academia Europaea; and Recipient of the International Soci ...
  ...
  Since his retirement Ingo Potrykus - as president of the international Humanitarian Golden Rice Board - is devoting his energy to guiding Golden Rice towards subsistence farmers across the many hurdl ...

• 
  www.lobbywatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=105 - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 8/22/2008    Last Visited: 8/22/2008  

  Ingo Potrykus
  
  Ingo Potrykus is the developer of 'Golden Rice' - a new yellow-tinted rice variety genetically engineered to contain beta-carotene, a vitamin-A precursor.
  
  Golden Rice has been promoted as a miracle crop, and Ingo Potrykus portrayed as a scientific hero, but there are many who question its real value and the role played by Potrykus in promoting it.
  
  Potrykus was born in Germany in 1933.He helped develop plant genetic engineering at the Friedrich Miescher-Institute, Basel, where he worked from the mid-1970s.He went on to become Professor of Plant Sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, from 1987 to April 1999, when he retired.
  
  Prior to his retirement, his research group focused on genetic engineering projects aimed at improving yield stability and food quality in rice, wheat, sorghum and cassava.His best known project is Golden Rice which, via the insertion of a bacterial gene and two daffodil genes, contains provitamin A.
  ...
  Since his retirement, Potrykus has devoted his time and energy to achieving the introduction of Golden Rice.He is president of the international Humanitarian Golden Rice Board and intends to make the rice freely available to 'national and international agricultural research centres'.Collaboration is already underway with 14 rice institutions in India, China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and the Philippines.
  
  However, Potrykus and his work remain highly controversial for two reasons: its PR exploitation, and the question of whether Golden Rice provides either the most effective or the most desirable solution to VAD.
  
  The controversy over the PR uses of Golden Rice arose in 2000 when, a year after his official retirement, Potrykus decided it was the time to launch a publicity offensive on Golden Rice.He initially submitted a paper to the journal Nature, with a covering letter pointing up its relevance to the wider GM debate, but Nature rejected it.
  ...
  Potrykus says, 'The press conference in St. Louis, the presentation at the Nature Biotechnology Conference in London, the Science publication with the commentary (Guerrinot 2000), the feature story in TIME Magazine all led to an overwhelming coverage of the "Golden Rice" story on TV, radio, and in the international press.'
  
  His relationship with the biotech industry is a long-standing one.As a result of his research, he is named as 'inventor' and thus has interest in some thirty plant-related patents, most of them belonging to Syngenta/Novartis.Alert to the value of the PR bonanza arising from Golden Rice, the biotech industry was keen to help Potrykus get round the multiple impediments posed by the intellectual property rights (IPR) the industry posessed.
  ...
  In reality, it was Potrykus himself who had encouraged the PR use of Golden Rice as a lever for promoting genetic engineering.He has said that he saw the publicising of Golden Rice as 'a timely and important demonstration of positive achievements of the GMO technology.

• 
  www.eolss.net/outlinecomponents/Biotechnology.aspx - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 11/20/2007    Last Visited: 7/19/2008  

  Ingo Potrykus, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Switzerland

• 
  tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/02/26/whole-foods-v-w - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 2/26/2007    Last Visited: 5/15/2007  

  Ingo Potrykus, a professor of Plant Sciences at ETH Zuerich in Switzerland says, "[Biofortification] of the basic stable crops for poor populations in developing countries is, most probably, the most sustainable and cost-effective approach to reduction in micro-nutrient malnutrition" . Potrykus argues that introduction of new GM crops is a plausible solution to the malnutrition problem because farmers can still use their traditional farming methods and farmers will not be dependent on anyone else.

• 
  www.proconservative.net/PCVol9Is201AveryBiotechDeaths.s - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 10/26/2007    Last Visited: 11/20/2007  

  Its developer, Ingo Potrykus, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, says his rice can save millions of lives among the poor, with no threat to the environment, no cost to the poor farmers who will raise it, and no benefit to corporations.Nevertheless, Greenpeace and other eco-groups ardently oppose this and all other genetically modified seeds.Potrykus says they'd rather have people die than be saved by high-tech seeds.

• 
  ifpriblog.org/rss2.aspx - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 10/2/2006    Last Visited: 9/8/2007  

  By inserting three genesâ€"two from a soil bacterium and one from a daffodilâ€"into the genetic material of rice, Ingo Potrykus of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and Peter Beyer of the University of Freiburg succeeded in 1999 in adding beta-carotene to the endosperm, the part of the rice grain that is consumed. This scientific advance, which came after 20 years of research, raised the promise of enormous nutritional benefits for those poor people who subsist largely on rice.
  ...
  The creation and further development of golden rice required not only splicing together the genetic material of separate organisms, but also melding the efforts and resources of individuals from universities, public research institutions, and a major multinational corporation in a public-private partnership (PPP) designed to address a serious problem facing poor people. After the initial breakthrough, Potrykus and Beyer entered a partnership with Syngenta (then known as Zeneca), an international agribusiness, to advance the research.

• 
  www.iatp.org/EnviroObs/News/news.cfm?News_ID=1090 - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 9/30/2001    Last Visited: 7/7/2002  

  By inserting two genes from daffodil and one gene from a bacterium, Dr. Ingo Potrykus of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and Dr. Peter Beyer of the University of Freiburg in Germany have managed to engineer a beta-carotene pathway into Taipei 309, a japonica rice variety.
  ...
  The small handful of transgenic rice grains produced in Potrykus' laboratory provided a much-needed public relations boost for the biotech industry at a time when genetic engineering is under siege in Europe, Japan, Brazil and other developing countries.The biotech lobby is selling the idea that genetically engineered (GE) crops, starting with golden rice, will solve problems of malnutrition.This is an ambitious goal for a small grain of rice.The malnutrition agenda is drawing in support from every major agricultural biotech company, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and its main funder, the Rockefeller Foundation.But at the end of the day, the main agenda for golden rice is not malnutrition but garnering greater support and acceptance for genetic engineering amongst the public, the scientific community and funding agencies1.Given this reality, the promise of golden rice should be taken with a pinch of salt.1.
  ...
  Dr. Potrykus initially approached Nestle, the world's biggest food company, for funding but was rejected.In retrospect, Dr. Potrykus describes this as "fortunate" because it kept the project open for public funding and the potential for free distribution3.But it was more of an afterthought than a plan.Despite being the result of public research, golden rice is enmeshed in around seventy patents owned by some thirty-two companies and institutions, according to the US-based International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA)4.Because of the complexity of licensing arrangements, the inventors ceded their rights to Greenovation, a biotech spin-off company from the University of Freiburg, which then struck a deal with AstraZeneca (now Syngenta).According to Dr. Potrykus, a veteran in dealing with multinational companies and an inventor of a number of patented technologies, forging an alliance with AstraZeneca seemed to be the only option available to gain "freedom-to-operate" and speed up the transfer of the technology to developing countries.Hence by a stroke of a pen, AstraZeneca was able to acquire exclusive commercial control over a technology that was developed with public funding and purportedly pursued for a humanitarian cause.Tangled up in patents The AstraZeneca deal gives the corporation full commercial rights to the invention worldwide and "non-commercial" rights to the inventors for license-free use by national and international research institutes and resource-poor farmers in developing countries.A resource-poor farmer may sell the golden rice so long as s/he does not earn more than $10,000 a year from it.Any other commercial use of the golden rice technology - using public or private germplasm - and any export from a producer country requires a license from Zeneca on commercial terms.Many see the deal with AstraZeneca as a rip-off.Despite of the huge number of patents involved, no more than 11 have the potential to serve as a barrier to the deployment of golden rice in countries with the highest levels of vitamin A deficiency, according to the Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI).
  ...
  From Bt rice to golden rice6 The first ever genetically engineered insect resistant indica rice variety also came out of the lab of Dr.Potrykus in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH).In April 1995, Dr. Potrykus sent Bt rice seeds containing a gene owned by Ciba Geigy (now Novartis) to IRRI in the Philippines.The package was intercepted by Greenpeace on the grounds that the necessary permit to export the genetically engineered seeds to the Philippines had not been obtained.But a week later, more Bt rice seeds were on their way to IRRI - this time via diplomatic pouch.IRRI's Bt research faced strong opposition from many NGOs in Asia and around the world and also caused tension even within IRRI itself where some of its more ecology-oriented scientists question the usefulness of Bt rice in farmers' fields.According to an IRRI scientist, Bt rice strains have also been sent to India, but up to now no field-testing has been conducted in the Philippines or India.According to Dr. Potrykus, agreements have already been established with several institutions in Southeast Asia, China, Africa and Latin America and are only awaiting submission of a written confirmation of the "freedom to operate" to the humanitarian board7.
  ...
  Last 19 January 2001, Dr. Potrykus arrived at IRRI with the golden rice, where scientists will start transferring the golden rice trait to commercial varieties.2.A REALITY-BASED ASSESSMENT Malnutrition is said to be high in rice-eating populations.But these nutritional problems are not caused directly by the consumption of rice.They reflect an overall imp
  
  NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for research and educational purposes.

• 
  www.agbioworld.org/newsletter_wm/index.php?caseid=archi - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 11/1/2006    Last Visited: 12/11/2007  

  The delay in the release of provitamin A rich Golden Rice for mass cultivation in India has led to an avoidable loss of 240,000 lives, says the co-inventor of the product Ingo Potrykus.
  
  The transgenic Golden Rice contains two novel genes - one from maize and other from a soil bacterium.It does not contain an antibiotic resistance marker gene.The only novelty being the protein from the bacterial gene - phytoene-desaturase, said Potrykus and claimed that no environmental risk or health problem was involved.According to him, Golden Rice would minimise vitamin A malnutrition on basis of traditional normal diet.
  
  Potrykus is perturbed over the 'extreme precautionary regulation' for genetically modified (GM) crops in India."It led, so far, to a delay of at least six years in the use of Golden Rice with a consequence of an avoidable loss of 240,000 lives," he said.
  
  He was also very critical of the 'anti-GMO lobby' for stalling the process of approval of GM crops and alleged that the delay in Indian regulatory process was due to 'European influence'.Golden Rice in India is still at the stage of development in the labs and the developers are yet to apply for permission for contained field trials and hence Potrykus charges against Indian regulatory authority seems to be misplaced.
  
  Potrykus who is also the chairman of the Humanitarian Golden Rice Board and Network that the technology to Indian public sector scientists for public good.
  ...
  The seed multinational, Syngenta, however, maintains the rights for commercial exploitation and those interested in commercialisation of the product would have to get a licence from that company, said Potrykus.
  
  Potrykus, however, hopes that Golden Rice would be released for farmers' field by 2012 and would rescue 40,000 lives per year and prevent 125,000 cases of blindness.He estimated annual loss of lives in India due to vitamin A deficiency at 71,600.

• 
  www.plantbiotechblog.com/blog-post/page/2 - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 10/7/2008    Last Visited: 8/26/2008  

  A personal communication from Professor Ingo Potrykus, the force behind Golden Rice, avers that by 1986 opposition to plant genetic engineering in Switzerland was so fierce that the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology decided to construct a grenade poof bacteria-tight glass green house (up to biosafety level 4) for him to continue his work on transgenic crops, more particularly Bt rice and Golden Rice, without fear from physical disturbance.

Page:  1 2 3 4 5