GM Research
Charges Fly, Confusion Reigns Over Golden Rice Study in Chinese Children
Mara Hvistendahl,
Martin Enserink
Figure
View larger version:
In this page
In a new window
Download PowerPoint Slide for Teaching
Scary science.
A cartoon from news agency Xinhua shows a U.S. researcher feeding genetically modified rice to a Chinese child.
"CREDIT: ZHU HUIQING"
SHANGHAI, CHINA—A U.S.-funded study in which Chinese schoolchildren were fed genetically modified (GM) rice 4 years ago has triggered a firestorm in the Chinese media. Newspaper columnists accused the main authors, both of Tufts University in Boston, of using children as “guinea pigs”; some stories likened the study to Japanese biowarfare experiments on Chinese prisoners in World War II. The furor has prompted several Chinese collaborators on the study to distance themselves from the work, and one of them was suspended.
The criticism targets a trial of golden rice, a controversial crop developed to fight vitamin A deficiency (Science, 25 April 2008, p. 468). The results of the trial, funded by the U.S. National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), were published online to little notice by The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition on 1 August. But on 29 August, Greenpeace China claimed in a press release that the study had violated a Chinese government “decision to abort plans for the trial,” which it called “a scandal of international proportions.”
The group offered little evidence to support its allegations, but in a 5 September statement, Tufts University said it is “deeply concerned” and is conducting a “thorough review.” Pending the outcome, an interview with the paper's first author, Guangwen Tang, would be “not appropriate,” a spokesperson says. (Tang is a Chinese-born researcher at a USDA-funded nutrition lab at Tufts.) The paper's last author, renowned nutrition scientist Robert Russell, was out earlier this week due to family circumstances.
The study had come under fire before. In 2008, the advocacy group GM Free Cymru (Wales) sounded the alarm, and 22 researchers decried the study as a breach of medical ethics in an open letter to Russell, arguing that golden rice was unsafe to eat. In a 2009 letter, an NIDDK communication officer said the study had been approved by ethical panels at Tufts and the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine, that there were “many safeguards” to protect participants, and that the U.S. Department of State had cleared the trial after a review for “any potentially negative foreign policy implications.”
By that time, the trial was already finished, says Adrian Dubock, manager of the Golden Rice Project in Dornach, Switzerland. (While not involved in the study, Dubock says he has followed it closely.) But Greenpeace says it had assumed the Chinese government halted the trial in 2008, citing an e-mail from that year from an official in the Chinese agriculture ministry's GMO Biological Safety Administration Office. The e-mail said the Zhejiang Provincial Department of Agriculture had been instructed to ask the Zhejiang Academy of Medical Sciences to stop the study. The ministry's office did not respond to interview requests.
Golden rice was created in the 1990s as an attempt to help people worldwide suffering from vitamin A deficiency, which is estimated to cause blindness in more than a quarter of a million children annually. By making rice produce β-carotene, a precursor to vitamin A, researchers hoped to solve that problem in countries where rice is a staple.
The study in China sought to find out how efficiently β-carotene from golden rice is converted to vitamin A once it's ingested. To be relevant, Dubock says, the trial had to be done in a rice-growing country and in children, who are most vulnerable to vitamin A shortages. According to the published study, the researchers fed 72 children either golden rice, spinach, or capsules with β-carotene in oil. They reported that golden rice was as good a vitamin source as the capsules and better than spinach—a “fantastic result,” Dubock says, because it means modest amounts of rice will provide benefits.
In the wake of the uproar, the Chinese co-authors have denied their involvement. On 5 September, the state-run People's Daily quoted Hu Yuming, a researcher at the Hunan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, as saying he was “completely baffled” as to why his name appeared on the paper. “I am unaware of that paper,” another co-author, Wang Yin of the Zhejiang Academy of Medical Sciences, reportedly told the same newspaper. (Neither could be reached for comment by Science.)
The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (Chinese CDC), however, confirmed that the Chinese researchers, including the CDC's Yin Shi'an, collaborated with Tang, but stated that they only gave the students spinach and capsules; the golden rice part was a Tufts project of which Yin had been unaware, the statement suggested. Nonetheless, the CDC suspended Yin for “inconsistencies” in his story.
The Chinese CDC account contradicts that of the Zhejiang Academy of Medical Sciences, which on 7 September said that Yin was listed as a principal investigator, with the academy's Wang, on an agreement the academy signed with Tufts in 2004 to research golden rice. (Yin declined to be interviewed.)
Dubock says he has received information that the Chinese researchers had been “intimidated” by home visits from police. “Of course they knew” that golden rice was being tested, he says. He calls Greenpeace's actions “callous and cynical” and says there's a “xenophobic” element to the outrage. One cartoon on the website of state news agency Xinhua showed a curly-haired scientist wearing a tie emblazoned with the American flag, staring through a microscope while dropping unnaturally colored kernels of rice into a Chinese child's mouth.
China's leaders are generally supportive of GM crop research (Science, 5 September 2008, p. 1279). The new controversy could mean “short-term adverse effects,” says Huang Jikun, director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy in Beijing. But ultimately, he says, “China's GM technology will continue to develop as the nation has planned.”
In this work, we have chosen to test one of the most used pesticides round the world. Roundup (R) formulations are non selective herbicides composed of mixtures of glyphosate (G) and adjuvants such as polyoxyethylene tallowamine (POEA) (Benachour et al., 2007b). These compounds, with the G metabolite aminomethylphosphonic acid (AMPA), are major contaminants in surface waters with levels reaching for instance 24 ppb for G in groundwater (IFEN, 2007). Moreover, these residues also concentrate in approximately 80% genetically modified plants grown for food and feed, which are rendered R tolerant, (尤其被用于转基因植物，因为转基因植物具有R抗性up to 400 ppm (maximal residual levels, U.S. EPA, 1998). We tested here R from 1 ppm to agricultural working dilutions on rat testicular cells.
?For application builders, iPad mini presents a whole lot more opportunity than challenge
Some people like a pocket-sized notebook, and some people like carrying round a legal pad. That's why for years, Moleskine has offered a dozen sizes for its notebooks, and convinced bookstores to carry them all. But despite the fact that Apple's iPad has replaced the notebook for a wide range of, it's always just come in a single size - until now. The company's new iPad mini represents a new size between the apple iphone and iPad, and despite the fact that it runs 275,000 iPad applications, it's got a several people a modest confused. Daring Fireball creator (and noted Apple evangelist) John Gruber tweeted. "It runs iPad applications, but the iPad Mini feels like a big apple iphone in use."
And also the 7.9-inch kind factor does feel really different. Paired having a big iBooks update. the iPad mini would seem aimed alot more at consumption than development (like Amazon's 7-inch Kindle Fire), yet, later in its presentation, Apple demoed the drawing application Paper on its new product. Perhaps it's simply just a smaller iPad for people that want a smaller iPad for any quantity of reasons. Or maybe it's Apple's e-reader that also does other stuff. So what is the iPad mini's utility, and does that make an iOS developer's job any significantly more confusing?
A newfound utility
"A lot of what we're really excited about is increasing mobility," FiftyThree co-founder and Paper designer Andrew S. Allen claimed for the Vergecast after Apple's event. "Having a smaller screen signifies you may take it a number of additional places and really feel a very little less awkward than pulling out your giant iPad. We're all about capturing ideas as they happen within the moment." Since iPad two applications run for the mini right out for the box, there will be no shortage of ways to engage with the new machine. Yet, nobody wants applications that aren't really created for your machine they're choosing. Paper gives you merely a smaller canvas, although some applications must scale down dozens of buttons and UI components.
"[The iPad mini] will be a concern for applications that did a poor job designing for your larger product, and for applications that are too busy and have too loads of things going on on one particular screen," one-time Flipboard for apple iphone designer Craig Mod explained over the Vergecast yesterday. He called out inventory trading applications and money applications as experiences that may get significantly diminished and perhaps become illegible on the the iPad mini's smaller screen. Yet, on the same time, he mentioned that since the iPad mini's screen is the same aspect ratio as its iPad brethren, designing for it may possibly yield a nice bonus for builders. "If you structure for a 7-inch screen to start with, then it will probably perform marvelous over a 10-inch," but does that logic apply after you flip things all around?
"If you style and design for a 7-inch screen number one, then it will probably succeed effective on the 10-inch."
Mod may have predicted a new trend in iOS application style: focusing for the iPad mini working experience to start with, and then scaling up from there - but not almost everyone agrees. "I don't think Apple wants builders to focus on the iPad mini specifically," Quotebook developer Matthew Bischoff says. "It complicates things for them immensely if people launch doing that." Pocket developer Steve Streza says, "We haven't seen any updates to Apple's developer equipment yet. It's unlikely that there will be a 'third' part of the universal application. But what I'm hoping for is some way to programmatically determine that the unit the application is managing on is the iPad mini. Then we can make changes to font sizes and stuff if we will need to."
Worrisome touch targets
In shrinking the iPad mini's screen, Apple has effectively also shrunk the size of "touch targets" - touchable areas over buttons inside applications. Just two years ago, Steve Jobs stated, "This size is useless unless you include sandpaper so people can sand their fingers down to the quarter of their size." Apparently to Apple that's no longer the case. "Will some buttons be too modest relating to the smaller display?" Grades designer Jeremy Olson asks. "We will be needing it in our hands to really know for sure, but I suspect most applications won't have to change noticeably, if anything." Apple's presentation confirms Olson's suspicions. The corporation usually demos a handful of new applications when it launches products at new variety factors, but not for your iPad mini. Instead, Apple chose to demo applications that currently exist, like Yelp, to demonstrate how they do the job just fine to the mini with no help from the application developer.
Even one particular game developer we spoke with was unfazed. "If people have been following Apple's 'minimum interactive area of 44x44 pixels' [for buttons inside apps], then they should be absolutely fine," claimed Matt Rix, who develops Trainyard for iOS. "Unfortunately, a lot of people don't follow that rule all the time (like Apple themselves - just seem for the purchase button on applications around the Application Retailer application), so it'll be interesting to see just how big an issue it really becomes," he included.
The "touch targets" about the iPad mini are apparently now about the size of those on an apple iphone, yet apple iphone applications are created for a significantly smaller screen from the get-go. And what about that tiny bezel? Since the iPad mini has a a great deal smaller bezel than the iPad, stray fingers seem to be a good deal additional doubtless to accidentally flip webpages despite the fact that you're reading in portrait mode. It's a problem tons of reading equipment have faced, from the Kindle to the Kobo. But, on its iPad mini style site, Apple says :
iPad mini intelligently recognizes whether your thumb is simply resting about the display or whether you're intentionally interacting with it. It's the kind of detail you'll detect - by not noticing it. And it's a incredible example of how Apple hardware and software perform together to give you the most popular working experience doable.
Only time will tell if errant button presses will be extra frequent over the iPad mini, but Apple appears to be to by now acknowledge at least 50 percent of your problem. We'll really have to wait and see how iPad mini differentiates amongst screen-edge drawing or gestures (like in Paper) and simply holding the edge in the screen although reading an iBook. "I've come to really trust Apple's decisions about these sorts of things," Application Cubby founder David Barnard says. "They really take incredible care inside the overall UX of their products and I don't think we're going to see them make a huge mistake like utilizing smallish bezels that develop supplemental accidental taps."
Apple's new pad
It could possibly be argued that it's worth owning an apple iphone and an iPad, but owning all three new equipment sounds ridiculous. Or maybe not - if you're the kind of person that carries all-around three differently sized notebooks - and in case you have deep pockets. Some people prefer reading with a sizeable screen, and some on the tiny screen. It's a huge pain for builders to develop applications for three distinct screen resolutions, and fortunately, it doesn't glimpse like they'll really need to. "The present iPad application we have will function fine for iPad mini owners," Streza says. "We'll make any style tweaks we ought once we have the product. In accordance with what we've seen on Android, the 7-inch tablet appears pretty popular for reading Pocket." The iPad mini could open up applications like Pocket to millions a good deal more people. Yet, builders would be required to make an inherent design and style flexibility into their applications so they look and feel OK on the four, 7.9, or 9.7-inch screen. Either way, an individual greater iOS product is extraordinary news for builders. Olson says, "This thing is going to sell like hotcakes, and that's a huge moreover for us."
A lot more from The Verge
楼主 
悔悟卡
