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.'"

Comments

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[Anonymous Coward]

Boy, am I getting sleepy

This has nothing to do with diabetes.

[elucido]

This has everything to do with mixing human and plant genetics. Why on earth would we want to do that, and mix it into the seeds? This is an example of ecosphere pollution, and when we run out of food because all the seeds are genetically fucked up, well, who knows what the result will be. Also what happens if these new human/plants evolve intelligence? Remember killer bees, the aggressive bees?

This is serious, why pick plants? Why don't we put human genes in our pets at least so we can monitor the experiment, Dogs and Cats would be fine for genetic experiments, because we don't eat them, they are domesticated, and we already treat them in a slave like fashion a lot of the time. No, instead we choose to enslave and domesticate the plant species next, and pollute the species genetically, who knows what the side effects of this are long term. Will it alter the evolution of plants? Possible. Will it cause plants to take over the earth in 1000 years? It's possible. I understand the reason why it makes sense to put human genes in animals and other mammals, but mixing humans and plants can have all sorts of long term side effects we cannot predict right now. Plant insulin already exists, so why do we need plants to generate animal insulin, and what exactly do we need it in the seed for?