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In the winter of 2014, students at Iowa State University received emails asking them to volunteer for an experiment. Researchers were looking for women who would eat bananas that had been genetically engineered to produce extra carotenes. . . .the experiment was testing how much of the carotenes in the bananas would transform to vitamin A. The researchers were part of an international team trying to end vitamin A deficiency.
“As a student in the sustainability program, I immediately started asking questions,” said Iowa State postdoc Rivka Fidel. “Is this proven safe? Have they considered the broader cultural and economic issues?”
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Aren’t there simpler ways to address vitamin A deficiency?
. . . .When Sommer first started working on vitamin A deficiency, he simply gave people pills. . . and that worked well. . . . You need every single kid in those villages to show up to take their medicine. In practice, that just doesn’t happen.
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. . . .But what about vegetables?
Dark leafy greens are rich in carotenes, and they’re abundant. . . .[But] It turns out that all the fiber in vegetables stymies our body’s attempts to absorb their carotenes. . . .To get their daily allowance from leafy greens, people would have to gorge.
Related on the SLP
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Is this a Trojan Horse for industrial agriculture?
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The banana. . . won’t be patented, and the government will probably give it away to farmers free. . . . [B]ananas reproduce by sending up genetically identical shoots, which farmers could replant or sell.
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. . . In the American mind, a “GMO” is a symbol for profit-driven corporations. . .
. . . . In this case, we have public scientists developing a crop to serve the poor, a crop that . . . would be controlled, bottom up, by farmers.
Read full, original post: These vitamin-fortified bananas might get you thinking differently about GMOs
