Juergen Eckhardt

Juergen Eckhardt leads Bayer’s impact investment unit, Leaps by Bayer.

The farmers in Italy needed help, remembers Vittoria Brambilla, a plant scientist at the University of Milan.

“We asked them, ‘how can we apply technology to do something for you?’” she recalls. “They all said rice blast is a problem. The fungus is everywhere in Italy.”

Rice blast is caused by the fungus Pyricularia oryzae, which evolves rapidly and gains resistance to fungicides. Some of the chemicals don’t help very much anymore, and others that don’t give rise to resistance are outlawed in the European Union. The blast infects a plant’s leaves, and when the plant is flowering, the fungus can spread to the neck and destroy the seeds. Blast infections reduce up to 50 percent of the rice produced worldwide, according to Brambilla.

So she and her team set out to help using gene editing.

They collaborated with a group of plant pathologists in the UK, who advised them on how to modify the rice genome to improve blast resistance. The variety they chose is very popular in Italy, and its grain makes excellent risotto. They produced the lines in the lab that looked “more resistant to blast, with less lesions,” but halted when it was time to move forward with field trials.

The regulation of gene-edited plants was unclear. GMOs, which are created by inserting genetic material from one species into another to confer advantageous traits, have been banned in Italy for over 20 years. Gene editing, by contrast, tweaks an organism’s own native genes without introducing any foreign DNA.

With the rice blast worsening, support for Vittoria’s project swelled from farmers and even from the country’s powerful trade unions, which, along with scientists, asked the politicians to allow field trials, since their approach used gene editing, not GMOs.

“They realized we cannot stay back with genetics, we need to innovate agriculture like the U.S., Canada, India, Japan,” Brambilla says.

Her team submitted a hefty application this year in January to begin the field trials, and they had approval in time to plant the rice, in May. It was a momentous occasion, the first field trial in more than twenty years for a genetically modified crop in the country. Scientists traveled from all over Italy the day gene-edited rice was transplanted in the field, including some who, two decades earlier, had had their own field trials abruptly halted when the country banned GMOs. Farmers and politicians came, and everyone celebrated.

“All were really happy that finally we could move forward after so many years not being able to,” Vittoria says.

The plants grew for more than a month. And then on June 21^st, two people came in and destroyed the field overnight. About 400 plants were yanked out of the soil, their roots chopped up. In the morning, their leaves were floating in the paddy field.

History Repeats Itself

It’s worth recalling here that more than a decade ago, activists similarly destroyed field trials of Golden Rice in the Philippines. Several European scientists famously created a GMO rice in the 1990s that produces beta carotene, which the human body converts to Vitamin A, an essential nutrient that is deficient in 125 million children worldwide. Such deficiencies cause blindness in 250,000 to 500,000 kids per year, and half of them die within a year of going blind, according to the World Health Organization.

Professor Brandon McFadden at the University of Arkansas, is not terribly surprised by the vandalism in Italy. McFadden, who is chair of Food Policy Economics in the Department of Agricultural Economics and Agribusiness, says, “The EU has had a pretty restrictive stance on biotech,” though there are some signs it is opening up.

He and his colleagues published a study about the public’s attitudes toward advancements in genetically modified crops. They found that 10 percent of people said no amount of evidence about safety would change their minds. This is unfortunate, because as the study above points out, “More than 4,000 science-based risk assessments have concluded genetically engineered crops do not pose greater risks than conventionally bred crops” and “the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concluded there had not been any scientifically documented human safety issues after 30 years of evaluation.”

“Unfortunately for people who are very hesitant, it takes some kind of tragic event occurring” to open their minds, McFadden says. “Like with the pandemic, we had the rapid production of a vaccine, and people were taking it, fast.”

A tragic event in agriculture is not purely theoretical. That’s why McFadden and other agricultural experts are convinced that new genomic techniques will play a major role now and in the future of crop protection.

“With a changing climate, with increases in invasive species and disease, there is going to be increased need for calories, putting pressure on crop production,” McFadden says. “And not just warmer temps, but more severe swings in weather patterns – too much drought here, too much rain there. The great benefit of a biotech solution is the time to development. With the pace of change we’re seeing, there’s no way crop production could keep up without it.”

Conventional breeding could take eight years of back crosses to create blast-resistant rice. With gene editing, by pinpointing the specific changes to be made, it only takes one year.

“And you don’t just exploit biodiversity that is there,” Vittoria points out. “You can create new biodiversity with gene editing.”

All Is Not Lost

After the rice field was destroyed, the farmers who desperately want the crop didn’t give up. They collected the chopped up plants in buckets, and after a few weeks, some of the plants started to produce roots. In July, Vittoria and her team planted them again. Not all survived, and they don’t all look the same. She estimates they now have about 100 plants, down from 400.

In better news, the destruction convinced the politicians to extend permission for field trials in gene editing through 2025. Now, other Italian scientists are applying to do field trials with gene-edited grapes for wine, and tomatoes.

And Vittoria has gotten her message out far and wide.

“When the plants were destroyed,” she says, “we went to prime time news on TV, which reached people normally not interested in science. In a way it was good to disseminate the importance of the technology and reach the public we could have never reached. As a scientist I would have preferred my field untouched, but as a professor and my role in society with dissemination, this was a success because we could really reach many more people.”

The rice fields will be cultivated this month to try to get results of the experiment.

At the very least, they are allowed to try again next year with a new gene-edited rice crop, possibly in a secret location.

Let’s hope for their success — and that Italy, along with the rest of the EU, will keep cracking open the door that’s been shut for far too long.

Thank you to Kira Peikoff for additional research and reporting on this article.

Published Date: September 12, 2024