Hsieh Feng-chia awarded Taiwan, China's first biopesticide patent
The Taiwan Agricultural Chemicals and Toxic Substances Research Institute under the Council of Agriculture developedTaiwan's first biopesticide, "Bacillus amyloliquefaciens Ba-BPD1", and obtained a patent for it. It can be used against pests and diseases in strawberries and rice, and added to animal feed to prevent gastroenteritis, offering limitless business opportunities. The man behind it is Hsieh Feng-chia, a researcher with a medical school background. Back then, he stumbled into pesticide research by accident, and the moment he entered the institute he was asked: "How many kinds of insects do you know?" After 8 years of hard work and screening more than 500 bacterial strains, his efforts finally bore fruit, but his mentor Kao Sui-sheng passed away suddenly one year before the patent was approved, becoming his greatest regret.
Hsieh Feng-chia studied in the Department of Medical Technology at China Medical College (now reorganised as the Department of Medical Laboratory Science and Biotechnology) and graduated from the Graduate Institute of Biochemistry at the National Defense Medical Center. His first job was at the Bureau of Food and Drug Analysis (now the Food and Drug Administration), where he reviewed the country's first influenza vaccine. He also worked as an administrative staff member at the Changhua Environmental Protection Bureau. Because he could not adapt to local politics, and it happened that the institute had a vacancy, he switched to becoming a "bacteria man".
The cradle of pesticide research in Taiwan consists roughly of departments of plant pathology, entomology, and agronomy or horticulture-related departments. When Hsieh Feng-chia entered the institute in 1999, colleagues there described him as "a little white rabbit lost in the jungle". The director jokingly asked him: "How many kinds of insects do you know?"
Recalling this period, Hsieh Feng-chia still remembers it vividly. "Although it was just a matter of switching the research subject from humans to insects, it still took me several years to adapt." In the first few years he had no research output at all, cramming books desperately every day, reviewing paper after paper, searching for a research direction, and going up mountains and down to the sea with team members to collect bacterial strains.
At that time, Bacillus amyloliquefaciens was a blue ocean. After 8 years of struggle, comparing strains one by one from a database of more than 500 strains, in 2008 he finally saw his efforts pay off. He isolated "Bacillus amyloliquefaciens Ba-BPD1" from deep mountain soil in Lishan, Taichung, and applied for a patent. In 2012 the patent was officially granted, making him the first person in Taiwan to do so.
He described selecting bacterial strains as being like training national team athletes: "Out of 100, there might not even be one." Researchers have to venture into extreme terrain such as hot spring areas, mud volcanoes and the seaside to collect strains. If ten banana trees in the same place all withered and died from disease, and only one stood firm, it might harbour that one-in-ten-thousand gold medal strain.
The Biofermin of the plant world: a rising star of biopesticides - Bacillus