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The Rockefeller Foundation: A long-term bet on scientific breakthrough

The Rockefeller Foundation’s international network for rice biotechnology

Like most organizations, scientific research teams are effective at pursuing their independent goals, but struggle to collaborate across disciplines, and are often disconnected from the on-the-ground challenges that their work could help to address. In the late 1970s, program officers at The Rockefeller Foundation (the “Foundation”) saw both of these barriers standing in the way of progress towards what they believed was a tremendous opportunity: using the new technologies of genomics and genetic engineering to help the world’s lowest-income consumers by creating a variety of rice that was dramatically more resilient and nutritious.

The Foundation had over thirty years of experience in agricultural science, having supported traditional cross-breeding research to produce improved staple crops since the 1940s, working in partnership with Ford Foundation and others to spur the “Green Revolution.” The Foundation’s program officers saw the potential for biotechnology to make even greater strides, but they also saw that the work had to happen across a disparate collection of research teams that were scattered across many different countries, institutions, and scientific fields. This story sketch explores how the Foundation chose to make an audacious long-term bet in the early 1980s, committing to spend 15 years providing those teams with the connectivity they needed to give the Global South a better kind of rice.


The need for a network of some form became clear to The Rockefeller Foundation’s program officers when they investigated what it would take to create new forms of rice. Initially, they saw reason for great optimism when the new genetic engineering technique of recombinant DNA emerged in the late 1970s. They could picture an ongoing chain from discovery to application, such that when a potentially-valuable way of changing the genome of a microbe was discovered at Stanford or Harvard, that researcher would share the knowledge and the DNA material with a plant researcher at UC Davis, Cornell, or Michigan State. That researcher would spend several years figuring out how to make a similar change to a rice plant, then share that knowledge and the new rice plants with an international rice research institute to use in a breeding program. Finally, just as in the Green Revolution, the most successful variant from the breeding program would be passed on to organizations that worked directly with farmers, putting the improved seeds into production.

But by the early 1980s, this vision began to falter, because research into the genetic engineering of tropical crops was still not occurring. Investigating why, the program officers saw that while each of the institutions involved were well-resourced and high-functioning at their respective tasks, a host of barriers remained. These teams had no direct incentive to work on this particular project, since both researchers and universities were primarily rewarded for publishing and patenting new genetic breakthroughs and selling those patents to agribusiness. They lacked any easy means of exchanging the crucial biological material, which required careful handling and the navigation of a thicket of international regulations that had sprung up around the international transport of genetically modified organisms. Most importantly, they lacked any way to maintain focus on the years-long process of translating basic science into viable new rice varietals and carrying feedback up the chain when potentially-promising avenues turned out to be dead ends.

Gary Toenniessen, one of the Foundation’s grantmakers, recalled seeing that there was no way to solve these problems without getting directly involved: “There was no single institution you could give a grant to and say, please create new biotechnology and use it to produce rice varieties. That was simply not the job they were hired to do.”

No single grantee could do the job, but Toenniessen and his fellow program officers believed that the Foundation was uniquely well-positioned to provide the necessary connective tissue itself. They could help knit together these institutions through funding to support collaboration. They also could play a central role without needing credit where there was, in his words, “only so much credit to go around.” The Foundation had built up both external networks and internal expertise in the area of agricultural research, and as the program officers tapped those networks, they were able to assemble a strong set of advisors, recruiting scientists who were leading researchers and also had a field-level view informed by work in administrative positions.

What particularly inspired Toenniessen and his colleagues was to hear from scientists that they found the goal itself inspiring. He knew the Foundation wasn’t in a position to demand anything of these institutions, but what it could do was pave the path for scientists to shape their work in a way that would benefit millions of low-income people rather than boosting the profits of global agribusiness. He knew the desire to contribute to that vision was widespread—it was up to the Foundation to create the right structure for tapping it.



Toenniessen and his fellow program officers sat down to map out what a network would need to look like to achieve the goals they had laid out. They quickly realized three things: it would need some funding and considerable staff time to keep people connected; it would need a pool of dedicated grant funding available to support related research work; and it couldn’t be done in any less than 15 years. They knew 15 years was a big ask to put in front of the trustees, but there was no shorter period that would do the job. There were three major stages, each of which would take five years:

  1. Creating rice biotechnology. The first five years would involve identifying grantees and supporting them to do basic research into the genomics and genetic engineering of rice.
  2. Building research capacity. The second five years would involve building the capacity among scientists, primarily in Asia, to apply the new discoveries to breeding new rice varieties.
  3. Producing rice varieties. The final five years would tap the newly-built capacity to accomplish the production of the newly-engineered rice varieties.

The program officers shared this plan with the trustees in late 1984 and won their approval to run the program for ten to 15 years. Looking back, Toenniessen is very glad that the Foundation was able to take such a long view: “Many donors look for short-term payoffs, where you can invest in something that’s at a tipping point and be in and out in five years with just as much impact as if you invested for the longer term. But I believe foundations can often be more effective working over the long term, particularly if capacity building is required.”



It’s common for a funder’s engagement with a network to evolve over time, but typically that evolution is difficult to anticipate. But in this case, Toenniessen and his fellow program officers were able to anticipate at least the outlines of two distinct roles that they would need to play as they transitioned through the stages.

  • Stage 1: Recruiting basic researchers and assessing their progress. To kick off the network, Toenniessen and his team began by courting the leading laboratories doing work on plant molecular biology to work on rice itself and a collection of related traits, encouraging them with both research funding and the vision of contributing to a larger goal. As that work got underway, he turned to monitoring the progress of that research, which he did with the help of an advisory committee of those researchers’ peers.
  • Stages 2 & 3: Placing rice-focused plant researchers at basic research labs. In the ten years that followed, the network moved into its second and third phases of work, and Toenniessen and his team shifted their role to transferring this new knowledge to institutions in countries that were heavy consumers and producers of rice. A central component of this work was simply moving the right staff between the right institutions. The Foundation provided fellowships to researchers from Asian countries including India, China, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines.  Some were for advanced degrees but the most effective fellowships enabled young scientists already trained in biotechnology to spend three months a year at one of the research institutions in the United States, Europe, Japan, or Australia that was funded to work on rice. Each fellowship was spent with the goal of learning about the latest discoveries, practicing at the most advanced facilities, and developing new ideas through interaction with the community of researchers. Even though the basic research institutions wouldn’t typically have accepted these scientists if they had applied independently, the institutions saw the value of contributing to the larger goal, and continued accepting some of these fellowships for as long as twelve years.

Toenniessen and his team mediated each of these placements, working with national research institutions in Asian nations to interview candidates for the fellowship and match them up with the appropriate research institutions. He and his team also built relationships within the network by running a newsletter, holding global convenings, and encouraging institutions in the network that wanted to collaborate to apply for funding. Sometimes they would even go further, spotting potential collaborations and playing matchmaker by asking if working together might be worthwhile.


This ambitious program ran for a total of 17 years, two years longer than planned, channeling a total of $105 million by The Rockefeller Foundation. Nearly all of that funding was used to support research, with $4.6 million used for the network’s meetings, administration, and other backbone functions, an average of $270,000 a year.

The research it supported in its first stage laid the scientific basis for “rice biotechnology” as we know it today: it created the first DNA molecular marker map of rice, unraveled age-old riddles of host-plant resistance, and made discoveries that revealed rice’s pivotal position in the evolution of cereal grains, giving it its place as the model cereal species in genomic research that it holds today. Perhaps the best-known outcome of the network was the creation of “golden rice” in 2000, a variety that is fortified with a precursor to vitamin A, addressing a dietary deficiency that is estimated to kill hundreds of thousands of children under the age of five each year. The Foundation concluded its support for the network that year, having trained over 400 scientists and built many long-term collaborative relationships, ties that continued in the following years and have likely contributed to advances we continue to see today in creating crops for the developing world.



In the section What network design would be most useful? we introduce a simple framework for comparing the ‘design’ of a network — eight basic variables that define its shape and size. See below for our estimation of the rice biotechnology network’s design (in teal) versus that of the other networks we profile (in white):

02 Rice Biotech-01


Sources: The Rockefeller Foundation’s International Program on Rice Biotechnology (2001) and a Monitor Institute interview with Gary Toenniessen (fall 2014).