WIKIMEDIA, INTERNATIONAL RICE RESEARCH INSTITUTEA US-funded study in which Chinese schoolchildren were fed genetically modified (GM) rice sparked a firestorm of controversy in China after it was published this August. The study’s authors were accused of violating ethical guidelines by not properly informing the parents about the GM rice. Following an official investigation, the Chinese Centre for Disease Control (CDC) has now sacked the study’s three China-based authors and offered generous financial compensation to the parents of the children involved.
“This is an alarm bell for biotech scientists on the importance of strictly following ethical and other regulations on research," wrote Huang Jikun, director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy in Beijing, in an e-mail to ScienceInsider. But Adrian Dubock, a Switzerland-based manager for the Golden Rice Project, which promotes development of GM rice, said most of the charges are unfounded.
Funded by the US National Institutes of Diabetes and Digestive Diseases and the US Department of Agriculture, the study was designed to find out how efficiently β-carotene in GM Golden Rice is converted into Vitamin A, of which there is a worldwide deficiency. According the CDC in China, 25 children from a school in Hunan province were fed the ...
