12 - Making biotechnology appropriate – and environmentally sound

Summary

Biotechnology, of which microbial technology is a crucial component, promises massive new interventions in health and agriculture in developing countries (Walgate, 1990).

For example, vaccines are now being developed for 28 diseases, including scourges such as malaria, which kills a million people – mostly children – every year in Africa alone. Yet since Louis Pasteur developed his vaccine against rabies in 1885, just 21 other vaccines have been produced. Just nine of the 22 are now used routinely against childhood diseases. The average rate of invention of routinely used vaccines has thus been less than one per decade. With biotechnology – using genes of the pathogenic microorganisms spliced into genomes of other, relatively benign bacteria and virusus – vaccine development rates are thus increased more than 20-fold.

In agriculture, virus-free cassava – produced by tissue culture, or by the engineering in of viral genes expressing the coat protein of cassava mosaic viruses – could doubly secure rural African calorie production; and hybrid rice, new wide crosses and perhaps engineered pest-resistant rice – and rice with new endophytic bacteria engineered to kill pests – could provide the extra 45 per cent rice production that Asia needs by the year 2000. Or so biotechnologists claim. What is needed is a more sober, human context for such claims. At the political level, the target should not be to build a capability in biotechnology at all costs but to alleviate poverty – which is surely the principal goal of development – and to see where biotechnology might help.