There's a very big difference when you think about medicine for the developing world and the developed world. In the developed world, it's okay if it costs a lot of money and, of course, the pharmaceutical companies love this. But when you come to the developing world, it is very important that the costs are kept low and that things are very practical. They do not have the money to invest in a lot of medicines, and they need cheap solutions to things. For instance, when it comes to vaccines. Vaccines are probably the best medicines that we have out there, and yet the vaccines we spread in the developed world tend to be against things that are not always appropriate for the developing world, in particular, vaccines against tropical diseases and so we don't do that. Cheap drugs. The moment we send out a lot of antibiotics, sort of common ones, and they overuse them. Targeted antibiotics would be much better. Antivirals would be much better. And of course, just basic care like pregnancy and primary diagnosis are very important. But you know what, if you're hungry, the thing that you really care about is food. You don't care about all these medicines, you want to get a good breakfast and you want to be able to eat during the course of the day. This is a problem for the developing world. In fact, in developing countries, in Africa, in South America, in Asia, in Central America, they need better crops. They need crops that will grow to a high yield on a small piece of land, because the bulk of the people only have a small piece of land on which to operate. They need to be able to mitigate the impact of global warming. Arid conditions are a big problem in many places, and water is not readily available. These kinds of improvements in crops can be made by genetic modification, by GMOs. Traditional plant breeding just doesn't do it. It's been tried on many occasions, and it doesn't do it. Part of the reason is because traditional plant breeding is very slow. Whereas, GM is a fast way of doing things. As I will argue, it is safer than doing it by traditional breeding. However, you'll notice the second line here, which says „Europe doesn't need GMOs“, and it's true. Because if you walk around almost any street in Europe, you don't find a lot of thin people. You don't find emaciated people, who have not had enough to eat. One has to ask why doesn't Europe endorse GMOs? Here is the technology that will be absolutely wonderful for the developing world, and yet Europe has decided they're against them. Why is that? Could it be politics? Could it be money? I would suggest to you it's a mix of both. Unfortunately, what happened was that when GMOs were first introduced into Europe, the Green Parties found it extremely useful to tackle GMOs. They did it because they didn't want some US Company or some other company to be controlling the food supply. They saw this as a move to take over the food supply - not just in Europe, but in the world. How could you stop that? Well, you could have complained to Monsanto and said, well, we will fight Monsanto and we'll boycott Monsanto. We'll have nothing to do with them. But that didn't happen. Why didn't it happen? It didn't happen because Monsanto provides a lot of the seeds from traditionally-bred plants that Europe needs in order to make its food. If you were against them, then you really would not have a lot of food, because it is a very important source of agricultural products in Europe. But the Green Parties saw this as a political opportunity. The politicians, as usual, said here is something that might be really risky. This could be very dangerous. But you know, I will protect you. I will save you from all of these problems. This is basically what happened. The beauty of this was that it had absolutely no consequence whatsoever for Europe because the Europeans don't need GMOs. The real villain here turned out to be Corporate America. It turned out to be Monsanto, DuPont, the companies that were trying to push GM foods on Europe. They did something that was rather foolish. What they did was to introduce crops that were very good for the farmers. The farmers could make a little more money. Monsanto could make a lot of money from them. And the consumers got nothing. One should realize that if you want to bring a new product to market, it's really good if you have something that you can offer the consumer. Lower prices, better taste, whatever. But, they didn't do that. They chose just to try to make money, and I think this was the downfall. It was something that was really very, very bad as far as Europe was concerned. Unfortunately, this has had some really tragic consequences. The consequences are that if you're going to say GMOs are bad, and they chose GMOs because this was the technology. It was something you could easily scare people with. I'm going to take a gene from here from a bacteria and put it in a plant, as though no genes had ever been transferred from bacteria to plants. And this could be dangerous. We don't know what it is. We don't know what it will do. This could be very dangerous. And so having picked GMOs as the target of their political wrath, they could then not go to the developing world and say, Doesn't make sense. Even they realized that this was not a very logical argument to make. So what did they do? They went out and started telling the rest of the world that here is a problem for you, too. I'll just recount one story that I rather like. They went down to Zimbabwe and talked to Robert Mugabe. Now, Mugabe is not the nicest man who runs a country. When he heard about this and was told that the US were giving a lot of food aid to Zimbabwe, but a lot of it was genetically modified, he locked it all up in warehouses. But the people in Zimbabwe were hungry, and so what did they do? They broke into the warehouses, stole the food and ate it. In this way, USA had actually had a probably better effect than it otherwise might have done, because here the people got it for nothing because they stole it out of the warehouse. Whereas, you can be pretty sure that Mugabe would have sold it to them if he'd had a chance. But this is a very, very dangerous message to be telling people who really need genetically modified plants, that they are dangerous and they can't have them. The other thing is, you have to realize that we have been genetically modifying our food ever since agriculture got started. Way, way back in Mesopotamia, they discovered here were some grasses that could produce a seed. You could farm them. Immediately they started crossing them. You do it by hybridization between two plants that are a little bit different, and then as far apart as you can, in the hope that you can make them grow taller, get bigger seeds, taste better. We have been doing this for a long, long, long time. This is traditional plant breeding and it's natural according to the Green Parties. However, what they don't usually bother to mention is that if by regular crossing you cannot get the trait you want. Then the next thing you do is you irradiate these plants and introduce a lot of mutations. Or you use chemical mutagens to try to get mutations that will introduce the traits you want. Don't worry, guys. This is safe. Nothing, no problems here. I give you one example of something that happens when you take this approach, in which what you do is you look for good traits. One of those traits is found in celery. Probably you've all eaten celery from time to time. However, if you work in a plant, in a factory where they are, say, chopping a lot of celery up, you discover that the ladies doing this, if they don't wear gloves, develop cancer in the hands and fingers because of psoralen. Celery contains psoralen, which is a known carcinogen. Just eating it is okay, the levels are pretty low, but if you get a lot of exposure, it is not good. If we were to test celery by the methods that the Europeans would have you test GM foods, you would not be eating celery any more. It would not be on the market, and it's not the only vegetable that falls into this category. One thing that happens with traditional plant breeding is that literally hundreds of genes are moved from one place to another. We don't know what those genes are. We don't test to see what's happened. Plants contain quite a lot of genes that are perhaps less than perfectly good for you. Ricin is a good example, one of the well-known poisons. But in general we don't know. We just do not know, and we don't test, and we do not require that the plants that result from this are as extensively tested as you would GM plants. But with GM methods, you can take one gene. You know exactly what it is. You can move it into another plant. Then you can test where did the gene go? Where did it insert in this plant? Nowadays, we can even make it insert where we want it to insert. You can look at it and see, did it go where you want it? Did it affect the transcription of the other genes? Inherently this so-called dangerous GMO method allows a level of precision in making new plants, in making GM plants, that greatly exceeds anything that is available by traditional plant breeding. Now, I'm not suggesting we stop traditional plant breeding. What I am suggesting, though, is that there is nothing dangerous, inherently dangerous, about the GMO method. If anything, it is more precise and likely to be safer than traditional methods. The important thing is, it doesn't matter what the method is. It's the product that is important. Once you test the product, find out is it safe? Is it good for you? But I would say we should do plants that have been made by traditional breeding methods in exactly the same way. You want to know, is the plant safe? Is the stuff that's going to go on your table, that you're going to feed to your children and your grandchildren - is it safe? It doesn't matter how it was made. Just, is it safe? I want to give what I find to be one of the most compelling studies here that really illustrates, to my mind at least, and I hope to yours, just how dangerous this position, that the Europeans have taken on GMOs, is for the rest of the world. This concerns Vitamin A-deficiency. If you do not get enough Vitamin A when you're a child, there are a number of problems. One of the problems is that you easily become blind. There are various developmental defects that can come from this, too. The estimate is that probably half a million children a year die because they're blind by age of one, because they don't get enough Vitamin A. Many others have developmental defects, and are not in good shape because Vitamin A affects other things other than the eyes. Somewhere between 1.9 - 2.7 million kids were affected every year because of this. Compare that with HIV and Tuberculosis and Malaria, which we worry about. But, you know these kids don't have a voice. No one hears them. The ones who are dead obviously have no voice, but even the ones who survive have a pretty hard life. You don't want to grow up in a hut in Africa if, in fact, you are deficient in any way. Two European Scientists, Ingo Potrykus at the ETH in Zurich, and Peter Beyer at the University of Freiburg, decided they were going to do something about this. They thought for much of the developing world, rice is a staple. This is shown here by this Philippine man, who is illustrating what they have made. They decided that they should put the gene for beta carotene, beta carotene is the precursor of Vitamin A, they would put this into the grain of rice. Now it turns out rice naturally produces beta carotene, it just doesn't go into the seed. It goes into the stalk and the roots and elsewhere. Initially they tried by traditional methods to get it to go into the grain. They were unable to do so. This is not unexpected. By traditional methods, you are very limited in what you can do. They took the gene for beta carotene from elsewhere, and arranged it with a suitable promoter so that it would be expressed in the grain of rice. The result was this yellow rice, golden rice, that is shown held by this Philippine man in this picture. For a good variety of golden rice, this provides almost all of the Vitamin A that is necessary and certainly enough to stop childhood blindness. Golden rice became a reality in February of 1999. By 2002, it was ready to go into the hands of the plant breeders. It was ready for people to start making commercial production of this. But it's a GMO. As a result of it being a GMO and the European regulations, it had to be extensively tested. Regulation after regulation after regulation was put in place. Originally, it was hoped that by 2014, last year, that it would actually be ready to go and be sold to people. Now, there's yet further delays and it's going to be at least 2016. In fact, one of those delays happened in the Philippines, not too long ago, where they wanted to do a small field test. The Green Parties in Norway, in particular, organized protests in the Philippines. They got a bunch of thugs to go out and burn the fields in which golden rice was being tested, because it's a GMO. Because GMOs are very dangerous. The bottom line here, there has been 14 years of delay because it's a GMO, because of regulation, and because of opposition from the Green Parties. Now you can ask, is it really dangerous? Are there some problems with this? On the left hand side, I have the start of a rather long list of national academies and prestigious scientific organizations, who have weighed in on this issue. One of the first was the Royal Society in London, who came out very positively in favour of GMOs. On the right hand side is the complete list of every professional scientific society that has said this is dangerous. You'll notice that there's no one on this list. There is not a single scientific society that believes GMOs are dangerous. But the Green Parties have convinced you, they have convinced the general public in Europe that these are dangerous, and that they should be banned, and that they should not be for sale, and maybe we need to label everything that has them in. I find it appalling, frankly. The bottom line is that since 2002, more than 15 million children - compare that with the Jews that died in the Holocaust – more than 15 million children have died or suffered because of Vitamin A deficiency. My question is how many children must die before we think this is a crime against humanity? I think more than enough have died already. It's high time that we decided that the Europeans must change their position, but in particular the Green Parties. And you know, the most appalling thing is, I'm a big supporter of the Green Parties, almost everything they do is terrific. We need to save the environment, but unfortunately this is one issue they got it wrong. Patrick Moore who started Greenpeace resigned some years ago now because of this policy on GMOs. Now he's walking around carrying banners protesting Greenpeace and protesting the Green Parties, because of what they're doing on GMOs. I think this is a very, very serious issue. It is one that we need to take action about now. My intention is to lead a campaign by the Nobel Laureates, most of whom I've already asked if they would join, and most have either responded positively or are thinking about it. I notice there are several people in this audience who have not yet responded positively. I hope they will. But more importantly, I hope that you will go out and talk about this issue. Will read about it. Will find out what is going on and will get at the truth. Will convince your families, your friends. Will convince your local societies. But this is really not an issue that we should just let the Green Parties take over. They've made a mistake. Why don't they just admit they made a mistake, get on with it, and do all the other good work that they really do? I just want to give you some idea of the kind of fabrications that the Green Parties come up with in order to promote the bans on GMOs. The first one was that you need massive amounts of golden rice in order to get sufficient Vitamin A. Well, they actually have backed off from that. For many years, they were - I'll show you a little slide they were using in a moment. The other thing is that they claim, well, there have been a lot of farmer suicides in India and that these are linked to biotechnology advances. I will show you a graph that really puts that one to rest. Finally, this idea that you need more pesticide if you use GMOs. This stems from one of the first crops that was produced by Monsanto, which was a Roundup-ready crop. Roundup is glyphosate. It is a compound that will kill pretty much everything that is green and grows in the ground. They made a variety of corn that was resistant to it: Roundup-ready corn. The nice thing is you plant the seed, spray it with Roundup, and corn is the only thing that grows. Glyphosate is not particularly dangerous. It naturally degrades within about one hundred days in the ground, long before it gets to market. There is no demonstrated danger associated with it, unless of course in its raw form you care to drink it. You know, that might be a problem, but I don't know too many people who think it's good to drink pesticides that are straight out of the bottle, so to speak. This is one of the posters they were using for golden rice. They said you need nine kilograms of cooked rice, three and a half kilograms of dry rice in order to get enough Vitamin A. The answer is 50 grams are actually enough, 150 grams of cooked rich, which is not a lot. I think anyone who's a Scientist knows 50 grams is not a lot of rice. This is the data on Indian Suicides starting in 1997. The two lines at the top, the one shows farmer suicides before Bt and then after Bt. Bt was adopted in cotton in 2003, and you'll see that the rate of suicides are essentially the same. They haven't gone up. And yet, still Greenpeace and Co. are telling you that this is a problem. That, you know, introducing biotech crops is causing Indian suicides. Finally, this is the one I like best of all. This is what I call the Pesticide Myth. In India, there is a lot of Bt cotton that is grown. Prior to 2001, traditional varieties of cotton were grown. Then, a GM cotton was produced in which the toxin, Bt, from bacillus thuringiensis, it's a protein on the outside of bacillus thuringiensis, which will kill insects. Prior to 2001, 5,750 metric tons of pesticides were being used. Bt, the bacteria that grows it, is often used just as a pesticide itself, but you need to put about a hundred times as much of the bacteria on as you need from the gene that goes in. In 2013, the use of pesticides for Bt cotton dropped to just a little over 200 metric tons. Massive decrease. And the yield? It almost doubled in the same time. I think you don't have to be terribly smart in order to realize that this is not leading to a vast increase in pesticide. Not only that, it's increasing yield, which means that in the long run, there is more land available to grow food. Food is a major problem for a huge number of people in this world. It's not a problem in Europe. Easy to get enough food in Europe, they have a supermarket down the road, and you go and buy whatever you need. You cannot do that in villages in Africa. You either grow it yourself or you have nothing. My conclusions here are that for developed countries, food is simply not a problem. But when we're going to take political actions and make statements, let's not forget the consequences of our statements and actions on the developing world. Because what works well in the developed countries, often doesn't work so well in the developing countries. I think one of the other points that I really feel we should make, because it relates to this, but to other things, too, is that we really need a lot more science going into politics and a lot less politics in science. At the moment, the politicians always claim they're going to have Science Advisors, and they're going to listen to the Scientists. Listening is one thing, but acting on the advice they receive is quite something else. In general, my experience has been that if you tell a politician something that they want to hear, and they can find some scientific basis for it, then they love it. But if you tell them something they don't want to hear, they just ignore it. This is not right. We really need to make sure that there a lot more science goes in. Finally, I think we've got to make sure that the media do a much better job of dealing with issues like this. The scientific consensus on GMO foods is clear - I showed you the table, And yet you go to the typical television programme, or a radio programme, or you go to the papers, and they will tell you this is a very controversial issue. In fact, the introduction to this talk said that this is a very sensitive issue. It should not be a sensitive issue. This is an issue where common sense should guide what is going on. The bottom line is that we, as Scientists, all need to do a better job of communicating to the public and telling them what is going on, and not just sit back in our labs and pretend somebody else is going to do it. Because you cannot trust the media to do it. You cannot trust the Green Parties to do it for you. Least of all can you trust the politicians to make the right decisions on issues like this. One of the things we are going to do is to put together a website - and there are plenty already, that will tell you about this - that will really point out what is good, what is bad. If anybody would like a copy of this set of slides to go talk to your friends, or your grandmother, or whoever, I will be more than happy to send it to you. But I think we all need to become active on issues like this, but this is a pressing one. There are going to be millions upon millions of people who die in the developing world, if we do not do something about the GMO issue. Thank you very much.