Earlier this year, Monsanto, a large biotechnology firm, announced a rough-and-ready sequence of the rice genome, and an international consortium is now trying to refine it.

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Part of its "Smarter Planet" initiative, one of the vignettes describes how some do-gooders used IBM software to map the rice genome, identifying what was killing crops and helping to end hunger.

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As well as leading China's contribution to the human genome sequence and working with Danish partners on the pig genome, this week the institute announced completion of a detailed map of the rice genome.

ECONOMIST: Chinese biotechnology

The rice genome was fully mapped in 2005.

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In any case, Syngenta says that it will combine its work with that of a public programme, the International Rice Genome Sequencing Project, which is plodding along to produce an even more accurate version of the sequence, and deposit the whole lot in GenBank by the end of next year.

ECONOMIST: The rice genome: Grain gain | The

Indeed, how else to explain why Honda has studied the maddeningly evasive cockroach (for anticollision technology), decoded the rice genome (to increase crop yields and create more-productive crops for biofuels) and developed a robot that can get instructions by reading human brain waves (to learn how machines and humans can better coexist).

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