Biotechnology is a solution to our perennial hunger but ....

Half a century ago, long before the word “biotechnology” turned divisive, a man by the name Steve Eberhart was involved in some form of genetic engineering at the Kitale Research Centre.

The US government had posted him here to transform Kenya’s agriculture.

According to documents at the Kenya National Archives, Dr Eberhart was a “maize geneticist” — a gene technician tasked with producing high quality, disease-resistant maize in the rainy Kenyan highlands. That was in the early 1960s.

His employer, US-based Rockefeller Foundation, described the then Kitale maize genetics research as a “project of international theoretical significance but of strong practical value”.

At the time, the controversial phrase “genetically-modified organism” (GMO) did not exist. But the art (or science) of genetic manipulation was present — at least in Kenya.

The Kitale maize genetics project became part of the Kitale Maize Research Programme that produced the now-popular hybrids, a cross-breed between Kenyan variants, including Muranatha, and species from Mexico.

Read more: http://www.nation.co.ke/Features/DN2/Biotechnology+is+a+solution+to+our+perennial+hunger+but/-/957860/1373430/-/11jgr8d/-/index.html