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Growing Insulin
McLuhanesque writes "The Globe and Mail reports that a Calgary biotech firm has developed a process to turn genetically modified safflower oil into human insulin in commercial quantities. The process reduces capital costs by 70% and product cost by 40%. 'SemBioSys says it can make more than one kilogram of human insulin per acre of safflower production. That amount could treat 2,500 diabetic patients for one year and, in turn, meet the world's total projected insulin demand in 2010 with less than 16,000 acres of safflower production.'"
...Wow, at long last, something innovative, good and useful from Canada. One wonders why this member of the G8 has no "name brand" product associated with it. All othe G8 members have something. Will it be this insulin stuff? Hope so.
Why do we need bio-technology, when we already HAVE plant insulin. Unless you can consume the seeds by mouth, I don't see how this is a useful advance. Human insulin from plants means if you plant the seed it will be part human, that freaks me the hell out, how about you?
At the same time, I understand the wisdom in creating hybrids, but lets please not mix plants and animals, it's obviously not right.
If our goal is to mix human genes as an experiment, lets use primates, lets create a bigfoot in a lab, lets mix human genes in dogs, or cats even, but why the hell in a plant? I'd love to be able to talk to my dog or cat, but why a plant?
I think anyone can see, that humans and plants arent designed to be matched up. Sure you can genetically engineer it, you can do anything, but why pick a plant? It's a useless function. Tell me the real reason anyone would choose a plant even for a genetic experiment? Why do we want to pollute the ecosphere? We cannot get another ecosphere, and while I know some experiments are important, why sunflower seeds ,and why human genes in sunflower seeds? We could be making food more nutritious and healthy, but instead we are working on putting human insulin in it, I think you can see why this seems a bit odd. In fact I cannot see how it can be a positive experiment in any way for anyone.
Each human does not have exactly the same genes, each animal does not have exactly the same genes, and the genes in a plant are VASTLY VASTLY different from the genes in a human. A plant grows from the damn ground and eats sunlight, tell me how the hell you can believe a human shares genes with a plant. Even if humans share a few genes with a plant, we don't share insulin genes with plants, we don't share brain and heart genes with plants, these genes are so specific to humans that plants can't use human insulin, well I guess now they can.