
Gates Foundation money squandered reinventing fruit for ‘ungrateful’ Africans.
Might Microsoft billionaires Bill and Melinda Gates’s plan to feed starving African children with high-tech superfoods have slipped on a banana? Nutritional tests on their first viable effort, a banana enriched with pro-vitamin A, have been postponed, with awkward questions being raised about the true purpose of the project.
Last November, the world’s first genetically bio-fortified banana, developed at an Australian university at the expense of the Gates Foundation, was due to be fed to young student volunteers at Iowa State University in the US.
Although the only creature previously exposed to the banana was a Mongolian gerbil and no safety testing had been done, 12 eager young things signed up in return for $900 each.
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