UC MEXUS grant recipient Norman Ellstrand, a professor of genetics at UC Riverside and director of the Biotechnology Impacts Center, has been selected to serve as the scientific consultant for a movie about transgenic rice.
"Basmati Blues" is a musical comedy set in India that revolves around a cross-cultural love triangle and the clash between agribusiness, which controls rice patents and poor farmers, whose rice production is affected.
Ellstrand is an international expert on the significance of plant gene flow as an evolutionary force, gene flow and hybridization, the consequences of unintentional gene flow, and the positive and negative effects of genetically engineered crops. He is a two-time recipient of UC MEXUS grants and was a lead presenter in the 2005 UC MEXUS program, Good seed? Bad seed? - Mexican Corn & the Threat to Food Security. The seminar discussed a three-year NAFTA study on whether genetically modified U.S. corn poses a threat to Mexico.
Ellstrand was awarded a 2000 UC MEXUS Faculty Grant for Biodiversity in Maize and Teosinte in Mexican Populations: Screening for Molecular Markers to Measure Genetic Variation and Gene Flow. The study grew to receive more substantial USDA funding, which in turn led to the recent publication of Ellstrand's critically acclaimed book, Dangerous Liaisons? When Cultivated Plants Mate with Their Wild Relatives, as well as prominent articles in several scientific journals. Many of the students and researchers involved in this study are now leading figures in current investigations into gene flow in and among plants. The same year, he was awarded a UC MEXUS Small Grant for Characterization of Naturally Sympatric and Allopatric Populations of Teosinte with Maize: Implications for the Risk of Extinction by Hybridization.
The issues associated with the cultivation of genetically modified rice parallel some of those associated with cultivation of genetically modified corn (maize).
Additional information on professor Ellstrand's research is available at: http://plantbiology.ucr.edu/people/?Ellstrand
For information about the movie, contact professor Elstrand directly at ellstrand@ucr.edu
Some studies on the social and economic effects of genetically modified rice can be found at:
- Bond, C.A., Carter, C.A., & Hossein Farzin, Y. (2003). "Medium grains, high stakes: Economics of
genetically modified rice in California." AgBioForum, 6(4), 146-154.
http://www.agbioforum.org/v6n4/v6n4a01-bond.htm - Bond, C.A., Carter, C.A., & Hossein Farzin, Y. (2005) "Economic and Environmental Impacts of
Adoption of Genetically Modified Rice in California." Giannini Foundation Research Report
350.
http://giannini.ucop.edu/ResearchReports/350_GMO_Rice.pdf - Virginia Tech: Participatory Assessment of Social and Economic Impacts of Biotechnology. Rice
Reports.
http://www.aaec.vt.edu/biotechimpact/rice/ricereports.htm - Anderson, Robert S. Edward Levy, Barrie M. Morrison (1991) Rice Science and Development Politics: Research Strategies and IRRI's Technologies Confront Asian Diversity (1950-1980). Oxford University Press, USA