Pamela Ronald a genetic engineer with little patience for debates over “frankenfoods.” If swapping some DNA base pairs around will fight hunger, she’s all for it. Besides, she says, people have been meddling with genes for more than 10,000 years. “Everything on your table, everything you eat, has been genetically improved,” Ronald says. “With the exception, maybe, of some wild blueberries, none of it occurs in nature.” Nevertheless, Ronald finds herself sidestepping the genetic modification controversy by helping develop the new field of “precision breeding.” Her lab at the University of California–Davis isolated a gene that imparts impressive flood tolerance to a rice variety found in eastern India. A collaborator then incorporated that Sub1 gene into a strain valued by Indian and Bangladeshi farmers. The new crops retained their best characteristics—but now the rice could survive for two weeks underwater, while conventional plants would have died within days. Since all the genetic material came from the same species, few observers—even in purity-obsessed Europe—can raise objections.
Researchers now plan to develop rice strains that need less moisture and fertilizer, can fight off destructive microbes and can thrive in saltier conditions. Roughly half of the world’s population relies on rice, so the development of more resilient strains can aid hundreds of millions around the globe. And that’s just the beginning. “Rice is like the fruit fly of cereal studies,” Ronald says. “What we discover in rice, we can apply to wheat and maize.”
