Imagine you're eating a banana.
Photo from Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images.
As you start to strip away the yellow peel, you notice that the inside seems different. Instead of the banana's flesh being a pale cream color, it's a rich golden-orange.
Would you eat that?
Because that's what scientists from Queensland University of Technology in Australia have created using genetic modification. And these golden bananas aren't just for show. They could save hundreds of thousands of kids a year from going blind, or even dying.
In the United States, bananas are smoothie ingredients and breakfast toppings. But in some parts of the world, they're as essential as bread.
Photo by Jean-Yves Paul/Flickr.
Bananas are one of the world's staple crops. In West Africa, they're as important to the local diet as rice is to East Asia or potatoes were to the Irish. In parts of Uganda, the typical diet includes more than two pounds of bananas a day.
But no single food has all the vitamins and minerals a person needs to live, and without a varied diet, you can get sick. For bananas and the people who depend on them, it's vitamin A that's the problem — there isn't enough in the fruit.
Not getting enough vitamin A is a big deal, especially for children. It can weaken the immune system and stunt growth, and it's the leading cause of preventable childhood blindness in the world. Of the preschool-age children who die every year in Africa, about 6% die of not getting enough vitamin A.
The obvious answer would be to eat a more varied diet, but fresh fruits and meat can be costly, and many low-income farmers don't have the money.
But now scientists might have an easy way to add that oh-so-crucial vitamin into any banana they please.
Not all bananas lack vitamin A, but the ones they eat in Uganda do. You could try to crossbreed them with a vitamin-rich variety, but unfortunately, that wouldn't work. Domesticated bananas are sterile.
So scientists used genetic modification. Using genes from a vitamin-A-rich (but hard-to-grow) strain called Fe'i, QUT professor James Dale and his team loaded commercially viable banana seedlings with beta-carotene, a source of vitamin A.
Photo by Jean-Yves Paul/Flickr.
It took some experimenting, but they were able to up the beta-carotene content in the fruit by more than 30 times — hopefully, enough to stave off vitamin A deficiency.
As an interesting side effect, the banana's flesh ended up turning a rich, golden yellow.
Beta-carotene isn't just a source of vitamin A. It's also a naturally occurring bright orange pigment. (It's responsible for giving carrots their color.)
As for taste, Dale says it was unaffected.
Photo by Jean-Yves Paul/Flickr.
This particular project was just a proof of concept, but Dale and his colleagues have now given the technology to local Ugandan scientists, who'll start experimenting with Ugandan banana plants.
"They will be the leaders," Dale says.
Other attempts to use genetic modification to fortify foods have been met with skepticism and resistance. In 2013, a field of vitamin-A-enriched "golden rice" was vandalized and destroyed by protesters in the Philippines. But Dale says their project is different from commercial genetic modification. They're not patenting any of the technology, and since domesticated bananas are sterile, there shouldn't be any worry about cross-pollination.
This could be an easy, self-sustaining way to save hundreds of thousands of kids a year.
The hope is to start sharing the bananas with Ugandan farmers soon. Once they're out there, the farmers will be free — and encouraged — to give saplings to their friends and neighbors, as well.
People could be planting, eating, and sharing the golden bananas as soon as 2021.
Funding for professor Dale's project was provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the U.K. Department for International Development.
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An Irish woman went to the doctor for a routine eye exam. She left with bright neon green eyes.
It's not easy seeing green.
Did she get superpowers?
Going to the eye doctor can be a hassle and a pain. It's not just the routine issues and inconveniences that come along when making a doctor appointment, but sometimes the various devices being used to check your eyes' health feel invasive and uncomfortable. But at least at the end of the appointment, most of us don't look like we're turning into The Incredible Hulk. That wasn't the case for one Irish woman.
Photographer Margerita B. Wargola was just going in for a routine eye exam at the hospital but ended up leaving with her eyes a shocking, bright neon green.
At the doctor's office, the nurse practitioner was prepping Wargola for a test with a machine that Wargola had experienced before. Before the test started, Wargola presumed the nurse had dropped some saline into her eyes, as they were feeling dry. After she blinked, everything went yellow.
Wargola and the nurse initially panicked. Neither knew what was going on as Wargola suddenly had yellow vision and radioactive-looking green eyes. After the initial shock, both realized the issue: the nurse forgot to ask Wargola to remove her contact lenses before putting contrast drops in her eyes for the exam. Wargola and the nurse quickly removed the lenses from her eyes and washed them thoroughly with saline. Fortunately, Wargola's eyes were unharmed. Unfortunately, her contacts were permanently stained and she didn't bring a spare pair.
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Since she has poor vision, Wargola was forced to drive herself home after the eye exam wearing the neon-green contact lenses that make her look like a member of the Green Lantern Corps. She couldn't help but laugh at her predicament and recorded a video explaining it all on social media. Since then, her video has sparked a couple Reddit threads and collected a bunch of comments on Instagram:
“But the REAL question is: do you now have X-Ray vision?”
“You can just say you're a superhero.”
“I would make a few stops on the way home just to freak some people out!”
“I would have lived it up! Grab a coffee, do grocery shopping, walk around a shopping center.”
“This one would pair well with that girl who ate something with turmeric with her invisalign on and walked around Paris smiling at people with seemingly BRIGHT YELLOW TEETH.”
“I would save those for fancy special occasions! WOW!”
“Every time I'd stop I'd turn slowly and stare at the person in the car next to me.”
“Keep them. Tell people what to do. They’ll do your bidding.”
In a follow-up Instagram video, Wargola showed her followers that she was safe at home with normal eyes, showing that the damaged contact lenses were so stained that they turned the saline solution in her contacts case into a bright Gatorade yellow. She wasn't mad at the nurse and, in fact, plans on keeping the lenses to wear on St. Patrick's Day or some other special occasion.
While no harm was done and a good laugh was had, it's still best for doctors, nurses, and patients alike to double-check and ask or tell if contact lenses are being worn before each eye test. If not, there might be more than ultra-green eyes to worry about.