This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 10 Dec 2006, by elizabeth helfant.
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10 Dec 06
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ssava. Cassava is a food staple and a source of income for hundreds of millions of Africans. The potato-like plant sustains Afric
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Barefoot children chase cars, calling out, "Bye-bye, Museveni!" For if someone is driving a car around here, he must be someone important, such as Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni.
It is a forgettable place, except for one thing: It is the epicenter of a pandemic whose shock waves still are ravaging Africa. -
in Uganda in the late 1980s, the virus mutated into something harsher. The new mosaic virus reduced cassava to barren stalks with useless roots. Farmers abandoned entire fields.
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But the plant has a flaw: mosaic virus. First discovered in 1894, the virus produces a yellow mosaic pattern as it withers the leaves. Without that photosynthetic area, rootwads are puny. A plant that might ideally produce 10 big "potatoes" instead offers up just a few small ones or none at all.
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First and foremost, the cassava project is a scientific experiment. The Danforth Center is coaxing governments to accept a technology that is still a work in progress.
The project also will test the role biotechnology has to play in stemming hunger by boosting crop yields. Biotech has yet to make much of an impact on Africa's poorest, who, some agricultural scientists say, could benefit more from investment in roads and fertilizer.
Finally, the cassava project is an experiment in the viability of nonprofit biotechnology. The 5-year-old Danforth Center is one of just a few public-sector biotech centers that freely licenses technology for humanitarian purposes. The center tackles crops ignored by the private sector because they are grown in poor countries where there isn't a market for biotech. -
ssistance might come from the basement of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in Creve Coeur, where a little cassava plant grows in a puddle of hormones, its leaves pressed and straining against a plastic petri dish.
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Scientists genetically engineered the plant in 1999 to resist the virus. Since then, they have been trying to give the technology away.
But African nations, caught between the United States and Europe in a smoldering fight over biotechnology, have yet to allow field tests on their soil. -
Cassava is a food staple and a source of income for hundreds of millions of Africans. The potato-like plant sustains African farmers when their less hardy crops fail. The virus has spread into at least nine countries and has cut cassava yields in half.
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Not AIDS. Not malaria. Not tuberculosis. But something just as destructive.
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