India Science and Technology Thread

[kronik]

No more copycats, Indian drugmakers fly high

Since new laws took effect in January, Indian generic-drug makers have completed at least a dozen deals with foreign partners who will sell their drugs, while three other deals involve Indian firms licensing new molecules or drug delivery systems.

For more than three decades, Indian companies thrived with the protection of laws that allowed them to copy drugs under patent elsewhere. To meet World Trade Organisation obligations, India changed the law at the start of this year to disallow copying of drugs patented after 1995.

Billions of dollars worth of drugs lose their patent protections over the next few years, luring Indian drug makers overseas to compete with their cheaper generic versions. Indian firms also need to keep expanding, and foreign markets offer the best opportunities.

India's Cadila Healthcare Ltd., Strides Arcolab Ltd., Matrix Laboratories Ltd., Orchid Chemicals & Pharmaceuticals have partnered with firms such as Mayne Pharma, Actavis, Aspen Pharmacare, Alpharma Inc, Tyco International and Stada Pharmaceuticals.

Ernst & Young estimates average R&D spending at Indian firms rose to 6 per cent of sales last year from 2 per cent three years ago, and could top 12 per cent in two years. Most is spent on generic drug development, but some is for new drug discovery too.

[centralized pandemonium]

Biotech industry revenue crosses $1 billion mark

http://www.hindu.com/2005/06/11/stor...1106711800.htm

[centralized pandemonium]

Matrix buys Belgian co for $263 m in India’s largest pharma deal

http://www.financialexpress.com/fe_f...ntent_id=94277

[centralized pandemonium]

Torrent to buy Pfizer's drug co in Germany

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/...2802480100.htm

[centralized pandemonium]

Forget BPOs, desi docs are in spotlight now

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/...ow/1158101.cms

[centralized pandemonium]

Nicholas to pick 17 pc stake in Canadian biotech firm

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/...0803390100.htm

[nik]

Biotech Park Kochi– enquiries flow in

(manoramaonline))
- Our Correspondent

Even with just the stone laying ceremony being completed at the Biotechnology Park at Kalamassery, enquiries are already flowing in. The park, coming under the auspices of KINFRA on 50 acres of land is expected to invest over Rs.600 crores in the next two years. The park had set a target for 20 big companies. Already, enquiries have been received from 10 companies involved in biotechnology. It has almost become clear that from the global tender called for building the basic infrastructure, the TCG Group could be selected. The group, based in USA will be operating through its franchisee Cargill Group. The same organization is setting up a biotechnology park on 110 acre at Pune along with the Maharashtra government. The investment here too has 85% from the Cargill Group.

At the Kinfra park, buildings and related facilities are coming up on 40 acres with an investment of Rs.100 crores. Other companies will be investing over Rs.500 crores. Cargill group will be involved in setting up the buildings and bringing in companies to the park. The promise is that the world’s leading companies will be attracted to come here. The company has taken up the land on lease for 90 years.

Kinfra is only be setting up the incubation centre with the help of central government. This project will involve an investment of Rs.23.19 crores of which Rs.11 crores will be from the central government. The balance will be invested by Kinfra. The incubation centre will have 10 units meant for basic research. The companies will carry out work research in medicines, tissue culture for agriculture, medicinal plants, value-addition of many bio products found in Kerala and many such areas here.

The main attraction is the bio-diversity of the state. Kinfra will give off 10 acres including the incubation centre to companies on rent. The rest facilities will be for companies and research institutions.
Kinfra plans to complete the incubation centre in one year and rest of the facilities within 2 years.

[anurag_rulz]

Rs.1 Billion Bio-tech park at Kharagpur

The first biotechnology park in West Bengal is to be set up at an estimated cost of Rs 1 billion following a tie-up on Thursday between the government and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Kharagpur.

State Industry Minister Nirupam Sen said here that the project at Kharagpur in East Midnapore district would be spread over 100 acres of land and developed with indigenous technology on a public-private partnership.

This is the first IIT in the country to be involved deeply in a biotech park project, said Partha P. Chakrabarti of IIT-Kharagpur.

The park will focus on several biotechnology areas like biometrics, healthcare devices and industrial enzymes.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/1...0600010003.htm

[Suncity]

India Science Report culled from various news reports.

The Indian National Science Academy (INSA) presented the
"India Science Report on science education, Human Resources and public attitude towards Science and Technology" today.

Based on the 'National Science Survey-2004', undertaken by the the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) , the report, released this morning by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, aims at assessing the actual stock of educated manpower, particularly scientific manpower, in the country and variation across states/ regions.

Highlights:

* Dispelling concerns about falling science enrolment in the country, the report shows that the proportion of those enrolled in science courses has gone up from 28.8 per cent of the population in 1995-96 to 34.6 in 2003-04. Within this, the proprtion of those doing engineering has almost doubled, from 6 per cent of the population studying at the graduate-plus level in 1995-2000 to 11.2 per cent in 2000-04.

* The report also reveals that there is an increasing awareness about the scientific issues among the country's populace. For example, despite low levels of literacy and spread of higher education, According to the survey, 77 per cent Indians feel that Science and Technology makes our lives healthier and easier.

* On the flip side, however, the number of unemployed among science graduates has witnessed a significant increase over the last decade while there has been a similar rise in the number of those with scientific qualifications going in for jobs other than those in science and technology.

* Also a matter of concern is the lack of availability of good and motivated teachers as well as inadequate infrastructural facilities for science education, specially at the higher education levels which often led to those in rural areas going in more for arts than sciences. The number of unemployed science postgraduates in the country was as much as 62.8 percent. 22 per cent of unemployed graduates in the country are from the science stream.

* Another matter of concern (as per the report) is that not many are taking an interest in pursuing agricultural education.

* When it comes to being politically and economically ‘‘attentive“ about 19 percent of India’s population can be considered attentive (reading newspapers, magazines etc.) which is higher than some advanced countries.

* India has 48.7 million graduates and above and about a fourth of these have a background of science education.

* There are 1.8 million post-graduates and 0.1 million doctorates.

* Delhi has the best-qualified population and 16 per cent of all Delhiites have at least a graduate degree.

* Uttar Pradesh accounts for the country's largest number of graduates and above.

* Andhra Pradesh has the highest population (14%) of science graduates and diploma holders in the country.

* Maharashtra leads in term of stock of commerce graduates.

* 40 percent of students surveyed wanted to become engineers and doctors.

* Students in lower classes have shown interest in science education - 60 percent of the students at the class 6th to 8th level said they wanted to pursue science education (pure science, engineering or medicine) as compared to 57 percent students in classes 11 and 12.

[cncity]

According to the latest statistics the literacy rate in 2001 in Delhi was
81.80 % .

[kronik]

Remember this thread?


`Reality check' for 7 IIT-status hopefuls

Now that the seven engineering institutions — shortlisted by the S.K. Joshi Committee for upgradation to Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) level — have submitted their vision documents, the Union Human Resource Development Ministry has set up a three-member technical committee to do a "reality check".

The institutes being considered for an upgrade are the Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University; the University College of Engineering combined with the University College of Technology, Osmania University; the Bengal Engineering (B.E.) College, Shibpur; the Jadavpur University's Engineering and Technology departments; Zakir Hussain College of Engineering and Technology, Aligarh Muslim University; the Andhra University College of Engineering and Cochin University of Science and Technology.

While Zakir Hussain College and the Institute of Technology are part of Central universities, the B.E. College is a deemed university, the Cochin University of Science and Technology is a State university dedicated entirely to technical education. The remaining three are part of State universities. Since bringing them on a par with the IITs would mean all-India admissions, the committee will have to look at whether such a move would be workable.

[Amit]

The India science pictures are really amazing!

From these pictures and some recent international magazine reports, I cannot help but notice that the western media is much better at telling the story of positive changes in India than the Indian media itself. I read through every article of two special editions: India: the next knowledge superpower? by New Scientist; and China and India: what you need to know now by Business Week.

Both these editions are amazingly comprehensive, and tell stories of scientific and economic progress in India in a way that I bet many Indians themselves are not aware of. I encourage every forumer to read their online versions. Infact, this thread is an excellent place to post the articles, so I will do that soon!

[Amit]

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/...24871.000.html

NESTLED amid the eucalyptus, cashew and coconut trees of Sriharikota Island on the eastern coast of India, north of Chennai, is a 76-metre steel tower. If all goes to plan, some time in late 2007 the tower will be engulfed in flames as India's first mission to the moon blasts off. Sriharikota will also be the launch site for India's most advanced scientific research satellite, Astrosat. The satellite will measure, among other things, X-ray radiation emitted by matter sucked into black holes and given off at the birth and collision of stars.

But why is India, a country that still has so many development problems on the ground, aiming for the heavens? To Indian scientists, the question is not only patronising of their scientific aspirations, it betrays an ignorance of the Indian space programme's greater purpose and successes against the odds.

India's political leaders say the country cannot afford not to have a space programme. Indira Gandhi, who was India's longest-serving prime minister, believed it was not only important for science, but also vital to India's development.

Take, for example, India's six remote-sensing satellites - the largest such constellation in the world. These monitor the country's land and coastal waters so that scientists can advise rural communities on the location of aquifers and where to find watercourses, suggest to fishermen when to set sail for the best catch, and warn coastal communities of imminent storms (see "Eyes in the sky"). India's seven communication satellites, the biggest civilian system in the Asia-Pacific region, now reach some of the remotest corners of the country, providing television coverage to 90 per cent of the population. The system is also being used to extend remote healthcare services and education to the rural poor.

But it has been a long time coming. When India first detonated a nuclear device in 1974, the US and European nations imposed widespread sanctions to restrict India's access to technologies that could be used to make a nuclear missile. This hobbled the country's rocket development programme and forced the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to reinvent technologies it could no longer buy. In the long run this has given India an advantage over other countries with aspirations to reach space. Its space programme is already largely self-sufficient and aims to soon be completely independent of foreign support.

It hasn't all been plain sailing. Its first rocket, the Satellite Launch Vehicle, ended up crashing into the Bay of Bengal 5 minutes after launch in 1979. The following year it placed a 40-kilogram remote-sensing satellite into near-Earth orbit, but the satellite's perigee was lower than planned and it entered the atmosphere and burnt up after only 130 orbits. The Augmented Satellite Launch Vehicle followed, and in 1992, after two crashes, it finally succeeded in lifting 150 kilograms to a height of 435 kilometres.

ISRO moved on to the Polar Synchronous Launch Vehicle, designed to carry 1-tonne satellites to a height of nearly 1000 kilometres. Though the first launch in September 1993 crashed, the PSLV has since performed flawlessly, placing seven Indian satellites and four from other countries into orbit. "It is our workhorse," says Madhavan Nair, director of ISRO. In 2003 the rocket was used to launch India's latest remote-sensing satellite, IRS-P6, capable of imaging the Earth's surface to a resolution of 5 metres.

To put its heavier communications satellites into geostationary orbit, India still has to rely on foreign hardware. But that may soon change. ISRO's latest rocket, the Geosynchronous Launch Vehicle (GSLV) is able to lift large satellites into geostationary orbit, 36,000 kilometres up. On 20 September 2004, the GSLV launched the 2-tonne EDUSAT, the world's first satellite dedicated to providing support for educational projects.

One of the GSLV's rocket boosters is a Russian-made cryogenic engine. International sanctions meant India was only allowed to buy engines, not the know-how to design and build them. So for future rockets ISRO engineers are developing their own. Ground tests have been completed and the plan is to launch a completely home-made GSLV-Mark 2 by the end of this year, Nair says.

ISRO is already planning the next-generation GSLV, the Mark 3, which will be powerful enough to launch India's biggest satellites. Nair now has his sights on the commercial market. A launch on GSLV-Mark 3 should cost about half the rate charged by France, the US and Russia, he says.

India's space programme is already a money-earner. ISRO sells infrared images from its remote-sensing satellites to other countries, including the US, where they are used for mapping. And the Technology Experiment Satellite, launched in October 2001, is beaming back images of the Earth's surface with a resolution of 1 metre, though they are not yet available commercially.

Three per cent of ISRO's $3.3 billion 5-year budget is devoted to the planned moon mission. A reconfigured PSLV rocket will lift Chandrayan - "moon vehicle" in Hindi - to 36,000 kilometres, after which the craft's own engines will take it to the moon. Nair says one of the purposes of the mission is to inspire Indian youngsters to take up a career in science.

Chandrayan will create 3D maps of the moon's surface at a resolution of between 5 and 10 metres, something that has never been done before. It will also map the distribution of ilmenite, a mineral that traps helium-3, a possible source of energy for future bases on the moon. No manned missions are planned, but if the trip is successful, robots might be sent up to collect samples.

According to Nair, the Madras School of Economics in Chennai has estimated that ISRO's projects have added between two and three times the organisation's budget to the nation's GDP. Several countries in Africa and Asia are seeking ISRO's help to emulate the model. "India is perhaps the only country where societal needs are met by the space programme in a cost-effective manner and the services are reaching the needy," says Nair.

[Amit]

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/...24871.100.html

TRAFFIC in Bangalore is now bumper-to-bumper just about everywhere and gridlock is a certainty during rush hour. A journey from the centre to the hub of the IT industry on the city's outskirts that took only 20 minutes a few years ago can now take two hours. Corporate limos jostle with autorickshaws, trucks, taxis and even vegetable vendors with pushcarts plying the day's produce. The city is choking under the influx of companies, both foreign and Indian, eager to partake of its seemingly inexhaustible supply of cheap programmers.

And there's little respite in sight for Bangalore's creaking infrastructure. You'd think companies would be starting to have qualms about opening new offices in the city. Think again. Some of the biggest names in IT are heading towards Bangalore once more, and this time round it's not cheap labour they are looking for. They are hunting down the brightest, most inventive minds in India to populate a swathe of cutting-edge research facilities.

The work being done in these labs rivals any in the US and Europe. Ajay Gupta, director of Hewlett-Packard's research labs in Bangalore, says India is the place to be. "HP sees its India lab as being on an equal footing with our other research labs worldwide," he says.

Things have moved on a long way in the 20 years since US chip giant Texas Instruments opened an office in Bangalore to crank out software for testing and verifying TI's chip manufacturing processes. Take the $80 million multidisciplinary centre set up by General Electric to serve the US company's research needs. The centre is GE's first and largest R&D lab outside the US. It has 2300 employees, 60 per cent of whom have a master's or PhD degree in science. Anything is fair game here - from plastics to turbines to molecular modelling. "We are not here to serve the Indian market, but to serve [GE's] global research agenda," says Guillermo Wille, managing director of the company's lab in Bangalore and the only non-Indian on site. The products of research done at the labs are purely for export.

Using techniques such as numerical analysis and computational fluid dynamics, the GE researchers have significantly improved the efficiency of the company's wind turbines and its engine for Boeing's planned 7E7 airliner. The centre is renowned for its materials science division, which invented a resin co-polymer that has made possible self-destructing CDs and DVDs. The discs are sold in sealed pouches: break the seal and the polymer reacts with air, making the disc unreadable 48 hours later. More mundane but no less significant is a water-saving washing machine also invented there.

Another high-profile firm to set up shop in Bangalore is Google, the California-based company whose name has become synonymous with internet searching. Krishna Bharat, co-founder of Google Labs India and inventor of Google News, is looking for top PhD graduates from Indian universities to augment the dozen or so researchers working in Google's largely empty two-storey office in Bangalore, which opened last year. Bharat's team will research ways to improve internet searching in Indian languages and work on voice interfaces and other alternatives to the keyboard and mouse. Bharat expects his centre will soon contribute to Google's global research effort. Other high-tech giants that have opened research labs in Bangalore include Cisco, Intel, Sun Microsystems and Motorola.

While many of these companies' developments are intended for application worldwide, Hewlett-Packard's approach is different. Its Bangalore research centre, opened in 2002, has the express purpose of applying local brains to local problems. "The poorer people in countries like India aren't served by existing technology, so we need to find new technologies for them," Gupta says. His team is exploring new ways of making the internet accessible to non-English-speakers, and they have invented a Hindi language keyboard to cater to a majority of the non-English-speaking Indians. The lab has also developed a cheap touch-sensitive pad-based system to write emails. The text is digitised as you write and sent as an attachment to a normal email. "It opens up the possibility for people who are intimidated by keyboards to communicate via email," says Gupta.

Microsoft joined the party this year, with a research centre in Bangalore also intended to address the needs of India and other Asian markets, such as developing Indian-language versions of its software.

Companies are choosing Bangalore for one main reason: the availability of good computer-science professionals. "We weren't able to hire enough good-quality engineers in Silicon Valley," Bharat says. The concentration of high-tech companies in the city is unparalleled almost anywhere in the world. At last count, Bangalore had more than 150,000 software engineers - approaching the kind of numbers only Silicon Valley can boast.

As well as being a hotbed of computing expertise, Bangalore has significant scientific talent, especially in physics and materials science. It is this that companies such as GE have come to Bangalore for, along with Indian researchers' mathematical skills in analysis and modelling. "They spend as much time in front of the computer as they do in the wet lab," Wille says.

Though Bangalore is the main focus for high-tech in India, it is not the only one. Other cities are vying for a piece of the research pie. IBM, for example, set up its labs on the campus of the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi in 1998, and now employs 100 researchers. Besides contributing to global projects such as the WebFountain web search engine, the centre invented a comprehensive voice-to-text recognition system that translates from Indian-accented English and Hindi into text in the respective language. "It's only on rare occasions like with the speech recognition system that our work has application only in India. Generally we try to build generic solutions that apply globally," says Ponani Gopalkrishnan, director of IBM's Delhi labs.

Though foreign multinationals have dominated the research agenda in India till now, a growing number of Indians who have worked abroad are returning home with cash, contacts and confidence to set up companies of their own. Mouli Raman, co-founder of Bangalore start-up OnMobile says, "For the first time, Indians who have been exposed to the world realise they can do something just as good. They believe they can be world-class."

[kronik]

India patents Yoga, Ayurveda

India is publishing a bulky encyclopedia, running into 30 million pages, which would extensively cover its vast traditional knowledge as part of efforts to keep out intellectual property invaders from patenting its indigenous wealth.

Work on the book, which would be in electronic format, is progressing at a feverish pace and already one-third of it has been completed.

The work, christened Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL), seeks to repel attempts by people abroad to patent traditional Indian knowledge, be it yoga or medicine systems like ayurveda.

"Even as this exercise (TKDL) is going on, 150 yoga asanas (postures) have been patented abroad...134 of these asanas were granted patent by the US Patent and Trademark office," dua said.

While traditional knoweldge has been in public domain in India in various vernacular languages, the same was not accessible by patent examiners abroad, he noted.

The National Institute for Science Communication and Information Resources (NISCAIR) is putting the document together based on ancient transcripts in Sanskrit and Persian.

NISCAIR sources said the book would save the government precious money, which could otherwise be lost in litigation costs trying to safeguard what rightfully belongs to the country.

Without naming the person, they said a prominent US-based yoga guru had patented 26 postures. The patent was granted due to the absence of reference material.

The E-document would be made available in all major international languages including French, German and Japanese so that patent examiners do not inadvertently grant patents.

[VaastuShastra]

Nice - there used to be cases of people filing patents for asanas in America.

[Luckystreak]

India joins nuclear fusion club

India joins $5.4 billion fusion project in France

[pding]

http://us.rediff.com/news/2006/jan/0...q=np&file=.htm

Scientists develop anti-inflammatory compounds

January 06, 2006 22:23 IST
Last Updated: January 06, 2006 22:28 IST

Indian scientists have produced five new compounds, which are more effective in fighting inflammation than commonly drugs such as aspirin and nimesulide.

Inflammation is a condition commonly characterised with pain and swelling, and is associated with diseases such as arthritis.

"These compounds are about 10,000 times better than the commonly used pain drugs such as nimesulide and aspirin in terms of potency," T P Singh, head of the Department of Biophysics at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, whose team carried out the work, said.

A team of AIIMS scientists, which carried out the work, has patented the compounds. These compounds do not have any side effects as 'these compounds belong to the category of peptides which are already present in our tissues,' Singh told PTI on the sidelines of the 93rd session of science congress in Hyderabad.

"We have already reached an understanding with a company to carry the work forward. Since these compounds are peptides, clinical studies on humans may directly begin, without animals studies," he said.

The problem with the currently used non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs such as nimesulide are that these are not specific in terms of their target of action, and affect other enzymes which are useful for the body.

Some of the commonly used anti-pain drugs also affect the lining of intestine causing digestion problems, he added.

The new compounds block the action of an enzyme called Phospholipase A2, Singh said.

Inflammation is caused when level of substances called 'eicosanoids' rise in the body. These substances are produced from phospholipids through enzymes - Phospholipase A2, COX and LOX. Thus, blockage of the action of these enzymes can lead to control of inflammation, he said.

The anti-inflammation drugs target either or more of these enzymes. Besides, there are some naturally occurring compounds also which block these enzymes.

The new compounds were developed after the mode of action of currently used drugs and the naturally occurring compounds was properly studied, he said.

India had great potential in the area of drug development, Singh said, stressing upon the need to give more attention on drug development."

[Amit]

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/...24871.500.html

WHEN Krishna Ella went to venture capitalists in 1995 he was laughed out of their offices. A molecular biologist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, he was proposing to make hepatitis B vaccine in India, his native land, for a mere dollar a shot. At the time UK drug firm SmithKline Beecham was selling the product in the west for 20 times that amount. "People thought: there's no way this guy can produce this vaccine at a dollar," Ella recalls.

Undeterred, he and his marketing manager wife Suchitra Ella sold their houses in America and India, abandoned their US careers and left for Hyderabad to set up their own company. They sank all they owned into the venture, begged money from friends, and finally won backing from an Indian bank. Their company, called Bharat Biotech, now sells the vaccine in developing countries for 28 cents a shot. It owns the second biggest production facility for this vaccine in the world and has an annual turnover of $7.3 million. "Those venture capitalists are kicking themselves now - you bet!" says Suchitra Ella.

The pair are typical of highly educated Indian expats who have forged their careers in the west, but are now returning to take advantage of new economic opportunities at home. Their intimate knowledge of western science and business is invaluable, and they are natural risk-takers. After all, this is not the first time in their lives they have made a daunting fresh start. "There is always dogma in science," says Krishna Ella. "To break the dogma you need to take risks."

Krishna and Suchitra Ella wanted to give something back to their home country, and setting up in India made good financial sense too. The country's economic liberalisation in the early 1990s has led to a wealth of new business opportunities and there is also a ready supply of well-educated scientists who are less costly than their US counterparts. And some states are throwing money at biotech start-ups. Genome valleys and knowledge parks are the current vogue as politicians try to tempt entrepreneurs with tax breaks, simplified regulation and guaranteed high-quality water, power and communications links.

So how did the Ellas manage to undercut the competition so dramatically? Hepatitis B is caused by a virus that attacks the liver, and which can cause lifelong infection, liver failure and cancer. It is usually spread through sex with someone who is infected, or by drug users sharing needles. In 1986 SmithKline Beecham launched a vaccine for hepatitis B, the first in the world to be produced by genetic engineering. It is made by adding genetic material to yeast cells so that they produce a key protein from the surface of the virus. People who are immunised with that protein produce antibodies that protect them should they subsequently encounter the virus.

Ten years ago Krishna Ella spotted that the purification method SmithKline Beecham used to extract the vaccine protein was relatively inefficient and costly. The multinational was using - and still uses to this day - a technique called ultracentrifugation, in which samples are subjected to 100,000 times gravity to separate the protein from DNA.

The equipment cost over $1.5 million and only recovered 15 per cent of the protein. What is more, the technique used caesium chloride, which is expensive and has to be completely removed from the final product because it is toxic. That makes disposal costly too.

Krishna Ella had come up with a new purification process that would eliminate ultracentrifuges and caesium chloride, and boost efficiency to 80 per cent. The vaccine protein has a phospholipid tail that is electrically neutral, unlike most of the yeast proteins and DNA, which carry an electrical charge. With Ella's method, called the Himax technique, the vaccine protein can be made to precipitate out of the solution onto a special matrix, while all the charged molecules stay put.

Bharat has since started manufacturing other products, such as a typhoid vaccine and an antibiotic for use against staphylococcus bacteria, which can cause skin and blood infections and pneumonia.

And the firm has got funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to carry out malaria vaccine research and to develop a cheap vaccine for rotavirus, a major cause of childhood diarrhoea in poor countries. This type of diarrhoea kills about half a million children every year.

Krishna Ella says he wants to tackle third-world diseases neglected by the multinationals, a sentiment often voiced by Indian entrepreneurs who believe scientists have a duty to the poor.

"It feels very satisfying," says Suchitra Ella. "We are on top of the world because we are doing something that is really required for countries like India."

[Amit]

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/...24876.900.html

"WESTERN protesters holding a cup of Starbucks have no business protesting against GM," says Kiran Sharma. Rich Europeans can afford to reject the technology, he says, "here, we don't have a choice."

Sharma believes passionately that GM crops can go a long way towards tackling hunger in the developing world. But he is no Monsanto stooge. Sharma is a scientist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics in Hyderabad, southern India. ICRISAT is a network of non-profit research institutes in developing countries, funded by donations from rich nations and international agencies.

GM succeeds where conventional breeding cannot, says Sharma, because it can produce traits, such as disease resistance and drought tolerance, that do not exist in a crop or its wild relatives. Bringing in genes from other species is the only way to improve these crops. "We are trying to give breeders something they don't have," he says.

India embraced GM in March 2002 when the government's Genetic Engineering Approval Committee gave the green light for three varieties of Bt cotton. The crops, owned by a Monsanto subsidiary called the Maharashtra Hybrid Seed Company (MAHYCO), have an added bacterial gene for a toxin that kills a major caterpillar pest called the American bollworm (Helicoverpa armigera). So far, Bt cotton is the only GM crop grown commercially in India.

Advocates of Bt cotton say it lets farmers use less pesticide - typically one or two sprays per harvest as opposed to three or four sprays for conventional varieties. They argue this makes it cheaper and more environmentally friendly because the Bt toxin only kills moth and butterfly caterpillars. But no one has studied in detail the effect of the crops on non-target insects and other species.

MAHYCO claims the GM crop typically yields around 30 per cent more than non-GM crops, but critics dispute this. Suman Sahai is organiser of the anti-GM group Gene Campaign in New Delhi. She and colleagues studied 100 farming families growing GM and non-GM cotton in the states of Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh. According to Sahai, yields of the non-Bt variety actually beat the GM crop by around 16 per cent, although the published results do not offer any figures to back up this claim.

Certainly that finding doesn't tally with the crop's popularity. "Farmers have bought it left and right," says Govindarajan Padmanaban, a biotechnologist at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. "Farmers are cleverer than the activists or the companies. They won't buy things if they do not work."

Sahai's main objection is that embracing GM will hand over control of India's food supply to multinational companies that are motivated by profit rather than the best interests of farmers and consumers. "They have nothing in the pipeline that is targeting the poor," she says. "The public is completely excluded from the decision-making process." Why gamble on a potentially dangerous technology with economic risks, she asks, when old-fashioned selective breeding has served so well.

Sharma says GM technology allows him to beat diseases that traditional breeding has failed to tackle, such as clump virus and rosette virus, which infect groundnut plants. He is also working on a "golden" groundnut variety which manufactures extra vitamin A for a more nutritious crop. Sharma is now conducting small-scale field trials of GM groundnut, pigeon pea and chickpea engineered at ICRISAT (see "Staple crops go GM").

The chickpea and pigeon pea are both genetically engineered to contain a Bt toxin gene. Sharma began by producing lots of GM varieties differing from one another in the position of the inserted gene in the genome. This can affect how strongly the gene is expressed and how well it is transmitted to the next generation. Then he narrowed down the initial versions to the handful he is field-testing.

The aim of his present field trials is to discover which versions work best outdoors before moving on to large-scale trials in farmers' fields. Both chickpea and pigeon pea are naturally drought resistant and are widely grown for food by subsistence farmers. Ultimately, Sharma intends to distribute the GM seeds to farmers for free.

GM research only takes up around 10 per cent of the research at ICRISAT, but the researchers there feel they have a special contribution to make because they cannot be seen as being in the pocket of industry. "We see ourselves as the acceptable face of GM," says ICRISAT's deputy director-general, Dyno Keatinge.

There is an expectation among researchers that opposition to GM crops will melt away once their home-grown research begins to deliver tangible results. India's farmers are already voting for Bt cotton by buying the seed. GM crops that are "Made in India" can only get more popular.