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Bio-Engineered Rice Uses Human Genes
gliph writes "Yahoo news has a piece about a small biogenetics firm that is using genetically engineered rice containing human genes to help fight diarrhea. From the article: 'Ventria's rice produces two human proteins found in mother's milk, saliva and tears, which help people hydrate and lessen the severity and duration of diarrhea attacks, a top killer of children in developing countries.'"
That's the questions. Not whether that rice has super-human powers. Is it fertile? Can the farmer put away some of his harvest for next year to plant a new crop or is the outcome of the rice sterile?
If it does, is he allowed to? May he actually plant that rice without a new license for next year? No kidding, some (very popular) sorts cannot be used anymore because the company holding the rights (yes, there is rights and patents on food. Go figure) doesn't allow using it anymore.
This malpractice is getting more and more common to make farmers dependent on industrial seeds.
So that's the questions I'd prefer to have answered. Not what the wonder-rice could be. I'd be interested in the question what it IS.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
On a slightly more serious note, I remember a while ago some mutterings about the suitability (or lack thereof) of GM foods for people on Halal / Kosher diets (I think pig genes in tomatos was the particular exanmple used)
/. readers who would be able to answer whether or not products like this rice could interfere with a religious diet?
Are there any moslem or jewish
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
1:133 people in the US have Celliac Disease - inability of the gut to absorb nutrient. #1 symptom = Diarhea. Diarhea wipes out the villi in the intestines, which is your body's system for up-taking nutrients from foods as they pass through the gut. No villi - no nutrients:: You Die.
I've seen no study to verify mammary colostrum and human tears have any propolactic effect on villi, but paired with rice its a good starter. Celliac Disease causes the body's immune system to adversely react to a protein found in wheat products - gluten. Celliac's are able eat rice without the toxic effects of other grains.
There is no cure, no treatment, no therapy for Celliac Disease. The only thing that can be done is remove gluten from the diet. The damage to the villi can be reversed in most cases and health maintained with a disciplined gluten-free diet for Life.
The GM rice/human DNA engineered grain could only reverse the death rate in developing countries if the GM DNA provide an immunity. The villi are delicate structures which regenerate all the time in health people. They are wiped out when anyone gets diarhea. That's what diarhea is, loss of villi, medically.
If the GM rice passes immunity to the villi, they have a treatment for every 1:133 American's living with the disease. Not bad market.
It's not just clean water, though that is a big piece of the pie. My parents spent 18 months in Mozambique doing missionary work. Diarrhea kills a LOT of children there. The important part is where it starts. In Mozambique, they don't have effective (or any) mosquito control programs. Nor do they have much access to anti-malarial drugs. As cheap as anti-malarials are, they cost too much for most of the population. Then you have to add to the problem that the hospitals don't have adequate equipment to sterilize everything, so it gets soap and water cleaning.
The best example I have is the story my dad told me about the security guard at the church (yes 24x7 security or everything would be stolen). This man's 2 year old daughter got malaria from a mosquito bite. The resulting diarrhea made him desperate enough to take her to the hospital. The IV of fluids she got helped, but she died shortly after from the staph infection she got from the needle.
When my parents went to her funeral, they were SHOCKED at the size of the cemetary. It was for children only. Dad said he'd never seen such a huge cemetary - it was 5 miles across. Every grave marker had a number on it. The marker for the little girl they were there to bury was #278,xxx. That is a LOT of children.
I don't remember the exact statistics my dad quoted me, but something like half of all children in Mozambique die by the age of 5. It would be even easier to provide mosquito control pesticides (which work quite well next door in South Africa, no anti-malarials needed), and the cheap anti-malarial drugs in bulk.
I'm no expert, but I'm a parent. I really feel for the people in these countries. It wouldn't take much to improve their situation dramatically. The other side of that coin is the rampant corruption in most African nations, which is a big stumbling block to getting aid to the people. That's a subject for another day though.
Glad to be of help :)
As to your follow up,
You make halal questions sound very personal choice / decentralized
Islam is indeed quite decentralized. An Islamic scholar cannot say "trust me and do this and that" , but he has to justify in detail why he says a certain rule should be followed.
All rules in Islam are derived from a set of well known sources (Mainly The Quran and quotes of the prophet) and a set of complex rules of inference from those sources that take years to learn. A scholar's authority over a normal person comes not from his position but from his knowledge and expertise in this area.
If Islamic scholars were asked about the tomatoes with pig genes issue,they will likely fall into one of the three camps I mentioned . If the majority agrees on one answer then this will be the 'agreement of scientists' which is the nearest thing we have to an official stance. If they didn't agree, a Muslim would have to see how each scholar's opinion was justified and make his/her own choice (or play it safe and avoid the product, especially that it's trivially easy when the product is a given brand of tomato!).
there's a couple of central authorities for 'certifying' foods as kosher (one in the US somewhere, and one in Israel) Does Islam have an equivilant authority?
Yes. In the USA and Europe ( and certainly in other countries) there are Islamic organizations whose job is to determine what food is haram and what is halal. They even publish lists of common brand names and their haram/halal status (can't remember their names though ).
But Muslims do not see these as authorities. We see them as helpful people who did the research for us, and they're almost certainly more correct than someone who didn't do the same research.