Scientific Infrastructure Vital for Helping the Poor

Los Baños, Philippines – World-class scientific facilities continue to play an increasingly important role in helping poor nations overcome poverty and food insecurity as well as handle new challenges such as the impact of climate change.

The continuing need for such infrastructure was highlighted at the annual meeting of the Board of Trustees (BOT) of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines. IRRI has spent millions of dollars over the past five years upgrading its main laboratories to keep them up to world scientific standards.

Earlier this month, at one of its regular meetings, the BOT approved the Institute’s annual capital equipment budget, highlighting the importance of maintaining and constantly seeking to improve infrastructure. “It’s easy to forget – especially at times of tight budgets – the importance of maintaining and improving scientific infrastructure,” the chairman of IRRI’s Board of Trustees, Keijiro Otsuka, said.

State-of-the-art facilities and equipment also have an important role to play in helping an organization attract and retain good staff. If a research institute has old infrastructure and equipment, it is unlikely to be able to attract world-class researchers – it may also find it difficult to retain existing staff.

“While advanced scientific research institutes in developed nations have a vital role to play in helping to solve some of the developing world’s most intractable problems, it’s essential that we also build, and continue to upgrade, scientific infrastructure in poorer nations,” Dr. Otsuka said. “And, it’s vital that institutes such as IRRI have the resources to continually upgrade and renovate their own labs and facilities; otherwise, they will quickly become irrelevant.”

As a result of the upgrading, the Institute has re-opened three labs on its main campus in Los Baños, just south of Manila:

• A microarray laboratory: First set up in 2001, this facility became fully operational in 2002 after an investment of about US$895,000 on new equipment and high-throughput genotyping instrumentation. It serves as a centralized facility supporting research and training to conduct gene expression analysis, genotyping, gene tagging/mapping, and marker-assisted breeding. It also provides access to the latest genomic tools to researchers from developing nations.

• A grain quality and nutrition laboratory: Opened in December 2004, after an investment of $1.2 million, this lab works with IRRI’s rice breeders and rice cereal chemists around the world to ensure that new rice varieties are developed to the highest possible standards in terms of quality and nutrition. This is achieved by research activities in the lab.

• A biotechnology laboratory: Opened in June 2006 after an investment of $1.7 million, this lab is a state-of-the-art, high-throughput transgenic research platform to enable developing countries to obtain new technologies and training. It also provides a unique capacity to develop public biotechnology products designed to benefit those nations without access to such facilities.

“If IRRI were unable to find the funding necessary to upgrade these facilities, our research would slowly become less and less relevant and we would cease to have the impact that we have had,” Dr. Otsuka warned. “But it’s not only IRRI; it’s vitally important that policymakers, donors, and other stakeholders understand that it’s not just about building infrastructure, but also about maintaining it and upgrading it on a regular basis.

“There is nothing worse than an organization spending millions of dollars on scientific infrastructure, only to see it fall into disrepair because it wasn’t maintained and updated,” Dr. Otsuka added. He said this was becoming increasingly important because of the very rapid progress being made in many scientific fields such as genetics and molecular biology.

“It will be a tragedy if the poor miss out on the many benefits being provided by our new scientific knowledge simply because they don’t have the facilities to use it and learn from it,” he concluded.
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The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) is the world’s leading rice research and training center. Based in the Philippines and with offices in 10 other Asian countries, it is an autonomous, nonprofit institution focused on improving the well-being of present and future generations of rice farmers and consumers, particularly those with low incomes, while preserving natural resources. IRRI is one of 15 centers funded through the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), an association of public and private donor agencies. Please visit the CGIAR website (www.cgiar.org) for more information.

For information, please contact:
Duncan Macintosh, IRRI, DAPO Box 7777, Metro Manila, Philippines; tel +63-2-580-5600; fax: +63-2-580-5699; email [email protected] .
Web sites:
IRRI Home (www.irri.org),
IRRI Library (http://ricelib.irri.org),
Rice Knowledge Bank (www.knowledgebank.irri.org).