www.nature.com/nature/journal/v435/n7046/images/4351146a-i4.0.jpg

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So why does it matter whether we accept and use these methods?  Why can’t we just do what we’re doing? Let me introduce Kenyan Florence Wambugu.   When she was 13, and even though food was rather scarce, her mother sold the family cow to pay for Florence to go to a boarding school 10 miles away.  Her mother needed permission from the village council to sell the cow and most people thought she was crazy for educating a daughter rather than marrying her off. Wambugu got a PhD in plant pathology in England and returned to Africa for a number of years trying to derive a virus resistant strain of sweet potato, a staple crop in her part of the world.  Sweet potatoes can be counted on when much else fails.  Here are some healthy ones in the middle and some virus-infected ones on the right.  Florence went to do research in the US and was invited to Monsanto, where she used the same kind of method that I described to you for papayas to develop a virus-resistant potato variety,.  She took it back to Africa with Monsanto’s blessing -- they donated the technology to Africa.  Today Wambugu lives and works in Nairobi, championing the importance of biotechnology for Africa.  The virus resistant sweet potatoes are being grown on the outskirts of Nairobi, but haven’t been released to farmers yet.   Wambugu faces some difficult obstacles. Groups from Greenpeace to the Union of Concerned Scientists fret that Africa is being manipulated by multinational corporations, in effect serving as one big--and potentially dangerous--genetic experiment. Concerned about such misunderstandings about transgenic plants, Wambugu created the  Harvest Biotech Foundation International to serve as a pan-African voice on the issue. Wambugu firmly believes that the potential good far outweighs the risks. She says:  You people in the developed world are certainly free to debate the merits of genetically modified foods, but can we please eat first?”