Golden rice – a miracle tarnished by irresponsible activism

“Their eyes tell their sad stories as ghostly white irises give way to vacant stares. We can look at them but they can’t look back at us. They’ve gone blind because of malnutrition.,” V. Ravichandran, a farmer in Tamil Nadu, India, describing children suffering from vitamin A deficiency. This is a dual tragedy — first, because more than two-thirds of the children referred to in Ravichandran’s commentary will be dead within a year — blindness from vitamin A deficiency (VAD) is an early sign of life-threatening debilitation — and second, because VAD could be prevented with an accessible, modern agricultural technology. The most elegant and practical approach to preventing VAD is a group of genetically engineered rice varieties known as Golden Rice because of its color, which is imparted by the presence of beta-carotene, the precursor of vitamin A.