CBU's 9th Set of Borlaug Medal Winners

Three lucky CBU subscribers comprise the 9th set of winners of the Knowledge Campaign on crop biotechnology, launched by the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA). They are Mulindwa Mukasa, WBS TV reporter from Uganda; Dr. Campbell Akujobi, lecturer at the Federal University of Technology, Nigeria; and Guodong Lu from the Lanzhou Veterinary Research Institute of Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, China. They will each get a bronze duplicate of the Dr. Norman E. Borlaug Congressional Gold Medal and are eligible for the grand draw of a netbook on December 31, 2010. Three medals will be drawn every week until the end of the year.

Geoffrey Kamadi (shown in picture), a freelance science journalist from Kenya, was one of the winners of the Dr. Norman E. Borlaug Congressional Gold Medal. Through an e-mail, Kamadi said: "I was wonderfully surprised to have been one of three winners selected to receive a bronze replica medal of Dr. Norman Borlaug. I wish to express my sincere gratitude for having been chosen and I must say I am humbled by this gesture which I truly regard as an honor. Biotechnology is an important field in science as it seeks to find solution to the problem of food insecurity, which is a big issue in many developing African countries like Kenya. And as a science journalist, I intend to make use of a lot of important and relevant information provided in the Crop Biotech Update to inform and educate my audience in Kenya and beyond, on this very important topic."

The International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA) launched a Knowledge Campaign which will run until December 31, 2010. The Knowledge Campaign for "A million healing hands to help a billion hungry" is dedicated to Dr. Norman Borlaug, 1970 Nobel Peace Laureate who was the founding patron of ISAAA. With his full support and initiative, ISAAA established the Global Knowledge Center on Crop Biotechnology in 2000 in the Philippines with active nodes called Biotechnology Information Centers (BICs) in 24 countries globally. ISAAA and its global family of BICs are celebrating a decade of success in spearheading the sharing of knowledge and capacity building on crop biotechnology to help alleviate poverty in developing countries.

ISAAA has institutionalized the sharing of knowledge on crop biotechnology by creating and distributing a weekly email-based newsletter Crop Biotech Update (CBU) which summarizes the latest world developments in agriculture, food and crop biotechnology relevant to developing countries. CBU is now distributed to over 850,000 subscribers in 200 countries and the campaign hopes to up the figures to 1 Million by December 31, 2010. ISAAA urges people participation by simply enrolling, without cost or obligation, 1 to 5 email addresses, or preferably more, of their co-professionals, and colleagues including students until December 31, 2010. To participate, log on to ISAAA Knowledge Campaign at http://www.isaaa.org/kc/cropbiotechupdate/invitepromo/cbu-promo.asp.