It was six o’clock in the morning of October 1^st of 1998 at Trieste International Airport and there I was sitting on a bench under the dimmed lights of the waiting hall, and mesmerized in the fascinating reading of a novel written by the Spanish author Javier Marías, Black Shoulders of Time (La negra espalda del tiempo). Marías had become my favorite writer these days and on this his most recent novel, he carries you through the fuzzy boundaries of fantasy and reality on the aftermath of his fiction book All Souls inspired by his sabbatical stay at Oxford many years ago. It turned out that his many readers all over the world believed they had "identified" the characters of real life corresponding to those created by Marías in his former book, including a "son" that he has never had, so he was prompted to write Black Shoulders of Time to explain how All Souls was written as a total fantasy and not as an autobiography of his Oxford time.

In my reading, I was at the page where a Mexican newspaper publishes a real obituary of one of Marías’ fiction characters, when I felt that as dawn was breaking in, and daylights flooded the room, some one was staring at me. A familiar face was indeed looking at me at the front seat, and with a broad smile he said "what an interesting meeting this was", so I immediately realized that it was one of the colleagues that have participated to the ICGEB Board of Governors that had just ended the day before in Trieste. All of a sudden I was at a transient disadvantage for not immediately recognizing my friendly colleague, who probably did notice me because of my intense and frequent criticisms that I have made at that meeting to broaden the scope of ICGEB and extend a technology bridge to its Member States and not just to be another center of basic research. My colleague went ahead and added:

"I would also be very interested in participating into that little workshop that both Madame Gu and you are planning to do in Beijing next Spring, I definitely think that this is the way to go for ICGEB, and while you were reading I was writing this into my report to our Minister in Bulgaria",

... and then he came forward and showed me a piece of paper with scribbles denoting his handwriting. To escape from my unexpected embarrassment for not recognizing my colleague, and from my surprise for his knowledge of what I thought was almost a secret between just three people (Madame Gu, Virander Chauhan, and myself), I responded trying to be natural, "sure, why not, so please give me your e-mail and I will gladly write to you" and, by casually looking at his business card I realized that it was Atanas Atanassov who was talking to me, and then we started a wonderful conversation on how his Institute could participate and add the European side to what it would be a meeting on plant biotechnology with scientists from four continents.I was very glad to find Atanas at the airport since I have felt frustrated the night before at the closing banquet because I could not finish my talks with Madame Gu and Virander to round up the details of what it would be the final form of our workshop.

Atanas, gave me the opportunity to continue with the planning, and my surprise and joy at the airport went in crescendo when in the middle of our talk, Madame Gu and Virander Chauhan appeared right in front of us at about 7 o’clock in the morning...

I was just simply astonished and could not say anything else except that "you guys are late for the first session of the Organizing Committee, that was formed on the spot!.

It was unbelievable, that fate had given us such an opportunity to hold our very first meeting, free, to make true a sort of a dream that have been sketched by Gu and myself, just the day before at a lunch at the cafeteria of ICGEB!. Fortune was so generous with all of us that not only permitted this gathering at the waiting hall of the airport, but also to extend it in the very same connecting flight despite our very different itineraries, Helsinki, Beijing, Sofia, and New Delhi. We were then allowed to delineate what you are seeing today on this marvelous scenario and occasion, to finally make this fantasy a factual reality.

We have chosen plant biotechnology as the subject of this first workshop of ICGEB because this technology is probably one of the most important tools that science has provided to face the formidable challenge of feeding a world population that grows at a pace of 1.5% per annum, and that it would mean 8 billion people inhabiting this planet by the year 2026 according to the US Census Bureau. This problem, however, will not affect much of the developed countries since the increase in human population occurs primarily at the underdeveloped nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

This fact creates the need of new alliances between the North and the South, producers and consumers, to speed the development and transfer of agricultural biotechnologies directed to increase the yield and nutritional quality of the main crops that feed the world. Agricultural biotechnology is a practical and commercial reality today with more than 70 million acres of transgenic plants being farmed last year worldwide, and a market that may reach the mark of $ 3 billion by next year.

Together with this new technology are urgent and extremely sensitive and complex implications that affect both the advanced and the developing countries, technologically, commercially, and socially. Among these issues we have sustainable growth, biosafety, the preservation of biodiversity, intellectual property and free trade, as well.

To make matters even more complicated, the development of modern biotechnology itself involves a more in-depth exploration of fundamental mechanisms of plant physiology and pathology that lag behind the discoveries that made possible the biotechnological achievements in the human health arena.

Allow me, please, then, to review some of the salient features of these very complex issues that are relevant to the use of plant biotechnology at a global scale, and let me start with biosafety and biodiversity, that affect very much the entire world and specially the so called developing countries.

Last February 14-21, the Colombian city of Cartagena was host for 10 days of very intensive international talks on the occasion of the so called Six Working Group meeting, followed by a conference of the parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity. These meetings were a follow up from previous conferences on biosafety originally derived from the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 that gave rise to the treaty signed and ratified by 175 parties.

The Biosafety Protocol is sponsored by the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, and its main purpose is to protect the cross-border transport of genetically modified organisms that may be potentially harmful to either biodiversity or to human health. This noble and desirable objective is to be supported by all countries, except that the commercial, technical, and political stakes are of such magnitude and ramifications that make the mission almost impossible.

These countries, in turn, started negotiations for a specific biosafety protocol that began to take shape at the second conference of the parties to the Biodiversity Convention in Jakarta, Indonesia, in November 1995. From there on, there have been a series of meetings of a technical working group that was supposed to finalize in Cartagena with the definitive form of the biosafety protocol. But the meeting stalled amid a big controversy and was technically suspended until a suitable date is found before May 2000.

After the Jakarta Conference, this effort was bound to be a failure because despite its grand purpose there were powerful forces mingling that made the effort very difficult to achieve. There, we have a highly politicized arena with three major contenders and overlapping agendas:

1. a commercial war between the most powerful player and developer of biotechnology in the world, the United States, and its lesser developed rival, the European Union, with all of its entanglements of directives aimed to block or retard the entry of American biotechnological products into most of its member states;
2. globalized environmental groups highly skilled in manipulating mass media and in desperate need to attract more public attention for their cause and, finally;
3. the so called underdeveloped world made by dozens of developing countries trying to preserve and defend the potential wealth of their biodiversity but ill advised by aficionados with little experience on the practical realities of technology development and transfer.

Most of the world, however, faces the very difficult dilemma of deciding between urgent solutions to sustain their growth and the potential dangers of this new technology that is now a commercial reality. Modern biotechnology may pose potentially serious harm to the environment and to the biodiversity of developing countries, but so far none of this has been scientifically proven. Nonetheless the media bombards us almost on daily basis with a doomsday scenario in which genetically modified organisms will imperil all biodiversity and human health as it is known today. To support this fearful scenario certain interest groups have extracted limited and unconfirmed experimental results recently published as scientific correspondence in Nature, last year.

These, have included an unsubstantiated report indicating that a transgenic plant displayed a 20 times higher outcross with neighboring wild-type mothers (Nature, 395, 25, 1998); and another (Nature, 395, 25, 1998) pointed to the appearance of natural resistance of plants in Australia to one of the most widely used herbicides, glyphosate (Roundupâ , made by Monsanto). This finding is being investigated by Monsanto scientists themselves, and it is to be expected from a phenotype property that is dependent of a single gene (the EPSPS gene).

More recently, there have been a paper published in Nature Biotechnology, last month (Nature Biotechnology, 17, 390-392, 1999) by Scott and Wilkinson, from the University of Reading in the UK, indicating the extremely low probability of the movement of maternally transmitted transgenes from transplantomic oilseed rape (Brassica napu) into wild relatives such as Brassica rapa. Such a finding highlights the dimension of effective transgenic crop management to decrease the risks of undesirable outcrosses into wild species. We are fortunate enough to have in this conference a presentation on chloroplast transformation by our colleague SivaReddy.

As with other advanced technologies, it is possible, however, that with time and widespread applications some undesirable and harmful effects may arise, but the answer has to be in the acquisition of a balance between benefits and liabilities, and not the blockage of international trade and technology transfer world-wide.

Another aspect of modern plant biotechnology that must be addressed is the need for more basic research into the molecular biology and genetics of plants, such as the "transmission of chloroplasts during natural interspecific hybridizations", for example, as we have seen above, with the necessity of urgent applications (and its societal implications) in agricultural biotechnology of key crops.

On this broad subject, we can be optimists as judged by recent developments that are bridging science and technology into a continuum, such as the availability of the information coming from the genome of Arabidopsis, and the many potential applications of post-genomic research.

Particularly relevant to this has been the report from the laboratory of Howard Goodman at Harvard Medical School, published in Science, last month (Vol. 284, 328-330, 1999) showing that by a single gene mutation it is possible to change the storage compounds of a seed, opening a way to "better manipulation of seed quality and the nutritional value of crop seeds". In this regard, genomics information from Arabidopsis has already been used to increase the vitamin E content of this plant, as shown by a recent report, published in Science, last December, by Shintani and DellaPenna, from the University of Nevada (Science, 282, 2098-2099, 1998).

These authors used a genomics-based approach to clone and superexpress in Arabidopsis a rate limiting enzyme for the synthesis of a -tocopherol from g -tocopherol , g -tocopherol methyltransferase. Transfected seeds from Arabidopsis overexpressing this enzyme contained nine fold more vitamin E than their wild-type counterparts.

These type of results open the way to extend its use to other crops and thereby elevate the nutritional value of important dietary sources of vitamin E. We also have among us two speakers that are involved in a project on the future applications of the Arabidopsis genome, professors Tumer and Lam, although they will be talking this time on a different subject related to their independent and exciting results of disease resistance in higher plants.

Iron fortification of rice seeds is another area of research that have received an impulse by the report of Goto et al, in Japan (Nature Biotechnology, 17, 282-286, 1999). These authors were able to transfect the soybean ferritin gene into Oryza sativa by Agrobacterium-mediated transformation to increase up to three fold the iron content of T1 seeds of rice.

In the field of pest protection we had had some very basic results with a strong potential for crop applications with the intriguing observation made by Pieter Vos and collaborators in the Netherlands (Nature Biotechnology, 16, 1365-1369, 1998), of potato resistance to both aphids and nematodes by the introduction of a single gene from tomato. This gene, Mi-1 of the type of plant resistance genes that encodes a nucleotide-binding site leucine-rich repeat should shed light into the basic mechanism of action of such genes, as well as to generate wider applications to sustainable agriculture.

Abiotic stress is another area of intense research to increase plant productivity, as illustrated by the recent report of Kasuga et al., in Japan (Nature Biotechnology, 17, 287-291, 1999). These authors obtained better tolerance of plants to drought, salt, and freezing by transfection with a single gene coding for a stress-inducible transcription factor in Arabidopsis. By using a construct with the transcription factor DREB1A that induces expression of stress tolerance genes, and the stress inducible promoter rd29A, transfected plants had about 80% tolerance to salt and drought stresses, for instance, as compared with the wild-type that only showed 18% tolerance.It is noteworthy that by using such a physiologic combination of promoter and transcription factor, the transgenic plants with improved stress tolerance did not show any negative effects on growth under nonstressed conditions as it did happen when they used a very strong promoter such as that from the cauliflower mosaic virus (CaMv).

The pipeline is thus full of an unprecedented combination of good and interesting science with the simultaneous generation of advanced biotechnologies to help feed an increasing world population. Together with this revolution, however, we have seen the emergence of powerful forces that could imperil its applications to the most needed countries. One of these factors is Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and the so called privatization of knowledge into the hands of a few multinationals of agri-business that dominate current markets of biotechnology, but this could also be viewed as an opportunity for dissemination of embedded knowledge into technology applications, specially if we take into account two tendencies of IPR:

1. the global harmonization of intellectual property law that creates better and more clear ground rules for the transfer of technology and;
2. (b) the increasing involvement of universities and public research institutes throughout the world into technology ownership and licensing for commercial exploitation by third parties.

Knowledge can not be entirely privatized because it is almost infinite and complex and escapes the dominion of a single entity, specially in an area such as plant biotechnology that still requires a tremendous amount of basic research. This fact has been recognized by the very same multinationals with the establishment of public centers of research financed entirely or largely by them, to attract the best researchers of universities and institutes. Examples of this we have seen it with two public major institutes founded by Monsanto in Bangalore, India, and in Saint Louis, Missouri, in close association with local universities.

This association of industry and academy reveals a trend that have been accelerating for the last ten years in the United States, among other developed countries. In the US alone there are more than 1,000 university-industry research centers on more than 200 university campuses, that in 1990 spent US$ 4.1 billion in R&D (Branscomb and Florida, Investing in Innovation, MIT Press, 1998).

The complexity of knowledge and the need to remain competitive within limited budgets has forced the industry to shift from central R&D laboratories to the so called "global R&D network" (Branscomb and Florida, Investing in Innovation, MIT Press, 1998); as well as the consolidation and vertical integration of large chemical industries that have absorbed seed and biotechnology companies. Examples of this we have it with the recent mergers and acquisitions of Monsanto/Cargill/Dekalb, Dupont/Pioneer, and more recently Hoechst and Schering (AgrEvo) with Rhone Poulenc to create the company Avantis.

This increased level of cooperation, of merging centers of technology is also observed in the scientific activities of many developed countries including the US. According to the most recent report of the US National Science Foundation (Science and Engineering Indicators, 1998):

We are, then, in the middle of a globalization of knowledge that we can not ignore but rather take conscious advantage of it.

On this workshop we will try to project how this trend of global cooperation for the production of knowledge and technology could be used to forge a worldwide alliance of basic research laboratories and institutes and/or companies to produce solutions in plant biotechnology. The workshop emerged from the broad actions suggested by the Report of the Working Group on the Joint Session of the Board of Governors with the Council of Scientific Advisors, headed by Dr. Xiaochen Gu, that was held last September in Trieste during the fifth session of the Board of Governors, and in particular we have focused on the following issue for a future additional role of ICGEB in Member States:

This goal could be achieved by constructing a technological platform resulting from the virtual integration and/or alignment of international research centers and programs such as ICGEB, CIAT, and CYTED, among others, with universities and institutes from different countries of the North and the South.

The workshop presents to us the opportunity to see successful examples of international and regional collaborations in plant biotechnology, such as those of the Programme of Science and Technology for Development that encompasses all 21 Latin American countries with Spain and Portugal (CYTED) and that will be presented by Alejandro Mentaberry.

From the CGIAR system, we will share the vision and activities of the Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) presented by Zaida Lentini; and from an important African country such as South Africa, David Berger will present his experience.

From a global scale that comprises 41 countries from all continents we will have three presentations from ICGEB scientists on an equal number of advanced aspects on the application of plant biotechnology.

At the national level, our co-organizer Atanas Atanassov will guide us through the efforts in genetic engineering for crop improvements made by Bulgaria, in the European Continent;

and to round up this global survey, our distinguished hosts from this distant and exciting Asian land, China, will share with us their experience on Bt-cotton by Shi-rong Jia; Rice genetic improvement, by Qifa Zhang; homology-based cloning or R-gene candidates from rice by Zhanglian Chen; and Guoying Wang on genetic engineering for maize improvement.

A glimpse of emerging biotechnologies that are being developed almost in a parallel fashion to a succession of intriguing and fascinating discoveries of plant genetics and molecular biology, will be introduced to us by our colleagues from Rutgers University in the United States, Nilgun Tumer and Eric Lam, as well as from other advanced laboratories from our colleagues of ICGEB in India, SivaReddy and Sudhir Sopory.

We do hope that in the final session of this workshop we could have a fruitful and open discussion on how to create this new alliance, and establish an amplifying mechanism to rapidly test the limits and scope of these new agricultural biotechnologies that keep pouring from the basic laboratories.

We also hope that in a not so distant future, and after completing due agreements in intellectual property, each participating country will be in a position to take advantage of this virtual platform to assemble its needed biotechnologies for their own benefit.