Cure to a crisis?

The October issue of FoodService Director will contain an Analysis piece I wrote entitled “The Great GMO Debate.” The article examines the concept of genetic engineering in agriculture and why some people, companies and organizations are so high on it while others are convinced it could mean the death of agriculture.

Because readers haven’t yet seen that article, consider this blog a pre-postscript to that feature. It concerns an article posted this week by The Business Insider, http://finance.yahoo.com/news/three-girls-won-google-science-170941521.html
and it made me smile and feel hopeful for our future.

According to the article, three Irish high school students won the Google Science Fair, “an online science and technology competition open to individuals and teams ages 13 to 18,” according to the fair’s website. The fair is co-sponsored by National Geographic, Scientific American, Virgin Galactic and Lego Education.

Ciara Judge, Sophie Healy-Thow and Emer Hickey earned the top prize at this year’s event with their project, “Combatting the global food crisis: Diazotroph Bacteria as a Cereal Crop Growth Promoter.” They claim that their 11-month experiment has proven that crops can be made to germinate faster and yield more food by infecting them with a certain type of bacteria.

Basically, they discovered that a bacteria called rhizobia, which creates nodules on the roots of pea plants and other legumes, assists the growth of these plants by converting nitrogen into other compounds that spur growth. The teens’ experiment was to see if these bacteria could do the same for grains. Their data showed that seeds infused with rhizobia germinated twice as fast as control seeds and the mass of the rhizobia-grown plants increased by as much as 70%.

Their research earned them each a $50,000 scholarship, a $10,000 research grant and a 10-day trip to the Galapagos Islands.

What does this have to do with genetic engineering? Nothing, and yet, perhaps, everything. The ostensible promise of genetic engineering is that it can help to feed more people. The major complaint the anti-GMO crowd has about genetic engineering is that it is feeding only the profits of a few chemical companies while not demonstrating much success in the quest to feed the world.

Now, along comes a trio of high schoolers with a potential solution that doesn’t require genetic manipulation. Perhaps continued research into the effects of rhizobia ultimately will be for naught. But for now, what three Irish teens have done is demonstrate that the solution to feeding an ever-growing population might not lie only with genetic engineering. At the very least, they’ve shown that genetics shouldn’t be the only focus for solving world hunger.

Let’s hope those scholarships they’ve received are put to good use at an agricultural college. We need their type of out-of-the-box thinking.