Asked by Dani A
Fisrt of all, english is my second language and I would really appreciate it if you could help me..I don't know what else I can do so please please please help me !!! I had to find a bad piece of wrtting on the internet and write an essay about it which desirbe why it's bad and why people shouldn't be reading it ? what can we do to improve this piece of writting ?why shouldn't people reading it? How this piece of writitng is diffrent from something with literary merit? OK.....I found this piece of writting on the internet,but I don't know how to answer these questions and write my essay ??? I have been trying to do that for 3 days and I'm still stuck..can you please give me some ideas to start with ..anything would be appreciate it. This essay is about Golden Rice : Rice that can solve the nutritional problems in many developing countries and that would be virtually free for the consumers? Could this be true? Golden rice is a genetically engineered crop that is supposed to be the answer for vitamin-A deficiencies in humans. But is this miracle rice really what it is all cracked up to be? benefits of Golden rice really outweigh the cost, the health and environmental risks, and the social problems that come along with it? Each year more than one million vitamin-A deficiency associated childhood deaths occur. According to the World Health Organization, as many as 230 million children are at risk of clinical or sub-clinical vitamin A deficiency, or VAD, a conditional that is largely preventable. “VAD makes children ‘especially’vulnerable to infections and worsens the course of many infections”; it is the single most important cause of blindness among children of developing countries. VAD usually occurs in India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippians, where rice is a staple food because normal rice grains do not contain beta-carotene, which can help prevent it. When researches led by Ingo Potrykus at the Swiss Federal Institute figured out how to get rice to produce beta-carotene, which the body turns into vitamin A, it appeared to be the answer people had been looking for to help solve nutritional problems around the world. To produce Golden Rice, researchers genetically engineered a laboratory variety of japonica rice. Japonica rice is adapted to temperate weather in Europe. They inserted three foreign genes into the rice: one from the bacterium Erwinia uredover and two from daffodils. Adding the beta-carotene to the rice turns it yellow, hence the name Golden Rice. The researchers claimed that this miracle Golden Rice was going to solve the world's VAD problems and the malnutrition of the world. Malnutrition is generally extremely high in rice-eating populations. But, these people's malnourishment is not directly due to the consumption of rice (Comstock, 2002). How much vitamin A a person can absorb depends on their overall nutrition, which includes adequate amounts of proteins, vitamin E, zinc, and fats. Fat and oil are necessary in the process of changing pro-vitamin A to vitamin A that is used in the body. Zinc insufficiency may lead to an impairment of vitamin A metabolism. Many people, who are suffering from vitamin A deficiency, are also experiencing generalized protein-energy malnutrition and intestinal infections that greatly interfere with the absorption and the conversion of beta-carotene to vitamin A (Brown, 2001). Even Dr. Ingo Potrykus has admitted that there is not one published study that proves that the human body can convert the beta-carotene in genetically engineered rice to vitamin A. Furthermore, Golden Rice appears likely to generate only a fraction of the additional vitamin A intake it initially promised. A report by the Food and Nutrition Board of the Institute of Medicine states that a 4-year old would have to eat 54 bowls of Golden Rice each day to get all the vitamin A in the recommended daily allowance. An adult would need to eat 10 pounds of rice a day. Gordon Conway, a spokesperson for the Rockefeller Foundation, who was financially supporting the study of Golden Rice, in a rebuttal of a statement by a campaigner against GM foods, stated that, "[Golden Rice] provides and excellent complements to fruits, vegetables, and animal products in diets and to various fortified foods and vitamin supplements." Golden Rice is an unstable construct; it is made up of a combination of genes and genetic material from viruses and bacteria, much that are associated with diseases in plants, and from other non-food species. To construct it, it is spliced into an artificial vector that is made from genetic parasites that are inside of cells. The vector used in Golden Rice is derived from the 'T-DNA,' which is part of the tumor-inducing genetic parasite of Agrobacterium, a soil bacterium. The genetic parasite, or plasmid, invades plant cells, inserting the T-DNA into the cell genome, causing the cell to develop into a tumor or gall. Golden Rice's ins