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Would You Like Drugs in Your Rice?
Digitus1337 writes "Wired has the scoop on a new type of rice that was just approved for production by a narrow vote. 'Ventria believes growing drugs that produce proteins like lactoferrin and lysozyme in rice could be a cheaper way to develop drugs than building and maintaining expensive manufacturing plants... Opponents say growing the crops in open fields endangers organic and conventional crops, as well as human health...'" Update: 03/30 23:15 GMT by T : That should probably read "growing rice that produces proteins like lactoferrin and lysozyme."
these aren't antibiotics. these are naturally occuring proteins that are present in breast milk that help fight infection. once a baby is weaned off breast milk, s/he no longer receives these proteins. so the idea is to give the non-breast feeding babies a supplement made from this rice so that the infant has a constant supply of the protein.
given that these are naturally occuring proteins that everyone was exposed to as a child, i think the liklihood of bacteria developing a new resistance to them is low (otherwise, it would have happened sometime within the past several thousand years)
There have been documented problems that can occur after harvest as well.
I personally don't have anything against generically engineered organisms, only that you have to be very careful managing them. While they shouldn't be able to compete as well as "natural" varieties, all it takes are a few big screw-ups to destroy the industry.
Indoor growing helps, as do a number of other controls that can be put in place. Moderate regulation is a good thing, in my opinion.
The best thing to do would be to tweak the plants so they are sterile, and thus, incapable of cross-pollinating. This should be a very easy thing to do.
The Philosophy of Liberty | lewrockwell.com
most genetically modified foods aren't made for the direct betterment of mankind. rather they are modified for the betterment of the plant. So, rather than make a tomato that is free of salmonella, they are making tomatos that are yucky to tomato worms (for the most part).
The species that are being made for the betterment of mankind typically are done to rectify dietary defficiencies in a given population. For example, vitamin A rice for developing countries which often have large populations of people who don't get enough vitamin A (lack of causes blindness). The rice in this particular story isn't meant to be used to better all people, but (as i read it) to be a supplement for babies who are not breast-feeding (as it was engineered to have proteins naturally occuring in breast milk).
The problem with genetically engineering crops isn't that we are "babying" our immune system (that's a separate issue mostly involving the overuse of antibiotics). Rather, the problem is the overreliance on single species (such as the vitamin A rice) and the lack of natural diversity. Eventually an opportunistic pest is going to come along and decimate your rice field; a condition that would be limited if multiple strains of rice were to be grown.
I suspect the "supplements for babies" line is a smokescreen designed to engender support for something they knew would be controversial. That may actually backfire, since it makes far more sense to simply make sure babies get real, complete breast milk, and anything that might be seen to undermine that (hello, Nestle) is going to garner negative press.
Lysozyme is next to useless as a drug because the molecule is too big to be absorbed and move around the body. It's really more like a kind of natural preservative for bodily fluids (such as milk, or mucous). I'm not sure about lactoferrin but I suspect it's the same story.
What I do know is that lactoferrin has recently been approved for testing as an antimicrobial agent for shipping and storing beef and other foods. In fact it's more likely to be accepted if it's from a GMO plant crop than sourced from animals, since vCJD has people rightly concerned about the latter process (reusing or combining animal products).
Lysozyme can be used in the same way, as a food preservative. Hell, you could clean floors with these things, put them in "antibacterial" soaps (which do more harm than good but I digress), etc. That sounds like a lot bigger and more lucrative market for industrially growing and extracting it, but it's likely not to come off quite so sympathetic in the press as making sure cute little babies are healthy.
Do we really want to risk our young daughters eating abnormal quantities of lactoferrin and risking a higher rate of gigantomastia and breast cancer?
I think you mean gynecomastia. Women don't get it, so I'd be more concerned about our young sons looking like young daughters, more than anything else. But your point is taken. Messing with the natural way of things hasn't always worked in ways we have intended. Putting iodine in salt worked pretty well, but the creation of a rice-based pharmacy when a substantial number of people depend on rice as their sole staple does merit some cause for concern, IMHO.
Anyone who has bought bulk rice is familiar with the fact that harvested rice is contaminated with bits of debris and wild rice.
Debris? Yes. Wild rice? No. So-called wild rice (Zizania aquatica) isn't even related to cultivated rice (Oryza sativa). They wouldn't likely be found together.
Even eating organic rice will not save you, since small amounts of rice seeds will surely drift on the winds and contaminate all crops.
Drifting seeds are not the problem. Drifting pollen is. I would hope that the researchers growing this rice would be very careful to prevent its escape into the environment, but given the profit motive and the unchecked spread of modified genes into traditional varieties of plants, it may be a lost cause. Or, to use a farm-country simile, it may be like closing the barn door after the horse is gone.
Most/many pollen grains are very small and can travel very far. I don't know of any pollen-specific studies offhand, but I guess they are out there. What I do know is that dust and ash travel is well documented. Ash from fires in Australia falls in New Zealand; dust from volcanoes encircles the world. Pollen will easily move from one island to another.
As for viability, there are many documented cases of seeds over 1000 years old being germinated.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
By and large the vegetables that you eat today are not nearly as good for you as the ones that your grandparents ate because soil depletion and crappy farming techniques have robbed them of their minerals and nutrients. Seriously now, you are an idiot.. the soil depletion argument you bring up is nothing but a load of garbage.. please familiarize yourself with modern farming practices.. (articles and such by Greenpeace and the like do not count [these organizations tend to have opinions about things that they have no real knowledge of and they tend to be massivly biased no matter what facts are put in front of them.])... the very argument of soil depletion having an effect on the food we grow is nothing but balony. Plants will not grow if there are no nutrients in the soil (or they will grow very poorly).. proper soil management requires properly testing and suplementing the soil with fertilizers. We are at the stage now where we can adaquatly test and characterize soil to add the proper nutrients to allow our food to grow to it's full potential. Letting the soil nutrients disappear does not make business sense to any farmer.. Food today is probably the most healthy it's ever been. The major reason we have now introduced GM into the industry is that we have reached a yeild peak using conventional hybrid technologies. Take corn for instance, around 100 years ago (before hybrid technology) to about 50 years ago there were steady gains in yield as the years progressed. This had a direct correlation to farming practices getting better and better (soil maintenace etc.)... they around 50 years ago the yield started to plateux as conventional farming practices failed to generate any real gains. To aleviate this problem hybrid technology was introcuced. Now for the last 50 years hybrid technology has been getting better and better, but we have reach a plateaux again. Now GM has given us another method of increasing yields, allowing us to leave our current plateux. GM foods are currently making many of the food we eat much safer and more healthy. For instance, many farms who use GM crops are now only spraying one or two chemicals versus conventional farmers who routinly use more than 10 or 20 different chemicals. Many of these chemicals I wouldn't go anywhere near. (I've used many of them, not very nice stuff). Overall I truely believe that GM crops are nesecary for the continued growth of the agrictulture industry in the western world. There must also be proper controls in place to regulate GM foods. Many of these controls are already in place. Many GM foods in the market currently have undergone 10 to 20 years of study to prove that they are more or less harmless (there is always some risk) On another note, some people suggest that we move to organic farming. This is not possible as we would revert back to yeilds from ~100 years ago. Many farms that convert to organic usually have no yield to speak of in their first 3 years of crops. After around 5 years they usually get between 25% to 50% of their typical yields under conventional farming. Organic farming is not a solution that is sustainable for feeding 6+ billion people. (unless there is a major movement to employ many orders of magnitude more farmers. probly 5 or 6 orders and pay 10 to 50 times for for you food) Right now, for better or worse, agriculture in the western world is changing drastically. Many farmers are leaving the industry for greener pastures as there is simply little money in the industry anymore unless they go large. The economics of farming only work today if farms are very large. Today for me enter dairy farming in Ontario I would require ~1 million dollars of capital and I would be looking to spend another 2 or 3 million again in 10 years. Now with some hard work I would be able to cash out in 25 - 35 years with ~15 - 25 million in capital. Provided the industry acts similar to how it has over the last 10 - 20 years. This is the business of farming today. The North American farming will change again in roughly 10 years as other cou
Yeah, but you'd never produce prions in this manner, or at all for that matter. Prions do a very poor job of catalyzing reactions and are completely useless for anything other than giving people vCJD. And I can't think of any other proteins that work when denatured. The shape of a protein is what gives its unique catalytic capability, denature it and that shape is gone, along with its functionality.
As for prions, not a lot is understood about them. It seems like they work by denaturing proteins, thus shutting down cell functions and generating more prions. They only seem to be a problem for nerve tissue, perhaps because of its low rate of division, but no one really knows. Also, while they do seem to be a large problem for herbivores (mad cow, chronic wasting disease, and a few other variants) they don't seem to have much of an effect on the carnivores that eat those herbivores. This seems to be true of people as well. Despite the fact that many millions of people (in Britain and elsewhere) have been exposed to BSE contaminated beef, there have only been a few thousand reported cases of vCJD.
Some researchers believe that natural herds of animals rely on carnivores to remove the animals with chronic wasting. While human hunters usually select the largest, healthiest animals, carnivores typically target the smallest, or weakest animals. This is a theory that will be soon put to the test as the elk herds in Yellowstone become infected with the chronic wasting epidemic that is sweeping northward through the Rocky Mountains. Researchers have noted chronic wasting starting to appear in the elk herds in Teton National Park, which borders Yellowstone on the south.
Also, CJD (the original kind of CJD which hits people in the later years of their life) seems to be tied to prions, but doesn't seem to be a problem for young people. CJD hasn't been tied to exposure to BSE, it seems that some people just get it later in life.