New at Reason

David Weigel | April 14, 2006

Ron Bailey peers into the future of biopharming.

Comments

|4.14.06 @ 1:01PM|#

Will any of these biopharm crops have left-handed DNA?

|4.14.06 @ 1:06PM|#

From TFA: "The beer giant Anheuser-Busch threatened to boycott rice produced in Missouri if Ventria's lactoferrin rice were grown in the state."

Rice in beer? Thanks for reminding me how badly Bud sucks.

|4.14.06 @ 1:42PM|#

Yet there are ways to grow plant-made pharmaceuticals other than open fields. For example, the North Carolina biotech company Biolex Therapeutics uses the aquatic plant lemna, also known as duckweed, to manufacture human proteins like alpha interferon and human growth hormone. The Biolex lemna system is completely contained within plastic modules, and the plants reproduce clonally; that is, they don't flower and they don't pollinate, so they can't crossbreed with other plants.

This I like. Provided it can be separated from the natural environment it would be fine. My biggest fear, oddly, is not the method of production but the safeguards that will be cut in search of the 'bottom line'. Duckweed is relatively innocuous, particularly if it is grown where a leak is nowhere near a natural body of water. However if it is grown near a body of water (most likely given the amount of fresh water that will be required for production) and the plastic vessel fails (as plastic tends to do over time when not regularly replaced) then the results could be tragic to the wild ecosystem and hard, if not impossible to remedy.

At least with corn, if it crossbred with a neighboring farmer's field and it was tested prior to making it to the food stream then the farmer would have a civil suit against the pharma for contaminating his corn.

|4.14.06 @ 6:36PM|#

Lemna does flower, albeit rarely, IIRC

|4.14.06 @ 7:23PM|#

While objections to hopping genes in the hoe cakes are indeed pretty corny given Zea Mays propensity to toss DNA around the environment like well, popcorn , inserting alkaloid -friendly sequences into plants is a serious business- producing the whole spectrum from codeine to colchicine in plants and gene enhanced plant cell culture may become a viable form of agropharming.

So is the antithetic business of inserting antisense sequences to allow the growth , for example,of caffeine free coffee beans for those demented souls who like to drink drug free hot brown water on arising.You can actually buy the stuff already.

The obvious corollary of covert antisense gene injection into the back 40 of say the Cali Cartel was examined by myself and David Jones in a _Nature_ Daedalus column entitled , what else : 'Coca-coda.'

You can read all about it in

Nature. (June 15 1989) v 339 n 6225. pp. 514-.

|4.15.06 @ 5:16AM|#

Mr. Bailey, this is an excellent article, and I certainly appreciate you addressing these concerns.

We are both in agreement that "there had better not be anymore cases like StarLink or Prodigene".

And I especially liked reading about the duckweed solution.

A couple of things (of course)...

According to this article:

http://www.agbioforum.org/v8n1/v8n1a03-elbehri.htm

... "more than 325 sites of field trials in the United States were approved from 1991 to 2004 for pharmaceutical, novel protein, and industrial enzymes".

So pharmacrops in the U.S.A. are already being grown on a pretty large scale. The type of pharmacrops being grown include:
vaccines, interferon, human growth hormone, etc...

So the question is, is the government up to the task of tightly regulating these crops?

Accoring to this report, the answer is NO.

http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051230/BUSINESS01/512300334/1030

"A report released Thursday by the USDA's inspector general said the department "lacks basic information" on where field tests are
or what is done with the crops after they are harvested."

And it would be better if all the farmers were as careful as Bill Horan, but personally, but that is an argument that I just don't buy.

|4.15.06 @ 5:24AM|#

Also here is an article about the ProdiGene incident.

http://www.extension.iastate.edu/grain/pages/grain/news/newsarchive/02biotechnews/021116bionews.html

Note especially the quote from the ProdiGene CEO:

"In a newsletter last year, Laos extolled the potential grower profits and mentioned, as an obstacle, government requirements to isolate the gene-altered corn from ordinary corn by as much as 1,320 feet. "We will be dealing with these distances until we can gain regulatory approval to lessen or abandon these requirements altogether," Laos wrote then."

|4.15.06 @ 6:17AM|#

Kwix said:

"At least with corn, if it crossbred with a neighboring farmer's field and it was tested prior to making it to the food stream then the farmer would have a civil suit against the pharma for contaminating his corn."

Good idea, except for one thing. Any non-exorbitantly priced test, would only test for antibiotic-resistant markers. So from the results of the test the farmer would know whether his crops has been contaminated with
GE genetic material, but not whether the GE genes were for herbicide resistance of for human growth hormone.

Maybe the government should insist that all pharmacrops be designed using a particular type of antbiotic-resistant marker, so that the marker could act as a red flag for any neighboring farmers.

|4.15.06 @ 9:55AM|#

I can understand the need to use a crop plant rather than a non-crop plant, but if safety became a concern why not use a crop that people don't eat? Something like cotton, for instance?

I don't know whether there are indeed legitimate safety issues here, or whether crops such as cotton are suitable, but it's worth thinking about.

Also, although I'm generally skeptical of complaints about GM food, here I can understand some fears: Medications are the sorts of things that can actually be bad for healthy people under some circumstances, or bad for sick people if consumed to excess. If you get an extra dose of medicine in your morning cornflakes, that's an obvious source of concern.

|4.15.06 @ 9:58AM|#

BTW, good article. I like the fact that problems and solutions were discussed very concretely.

|4.15.06 @ 11:42AM|#

Why not use tobacco plants? This way you'd have both tobacco farmers and anti-smoking crusaders happy.

Larry A|4.15.06 @ 3:06PM|#

I only wonder how long it will be before DEA finds someone raising corn that produces <insert illegal drug here>

|4.15.06 @ 3:39PM|#

Larry-

If you thought the meth problem in the great plains states was bad before, just wait for the meth corn!

"In today's news, nobody in Nebraska has slept in more than 72 hours."

|4.16.06 @ 9:24PM|#

Why not use hemp. You could produce the drug of your choice, smoke a little to stay happy, use the fiber to make paper, and cloth. Just think of the giant rastafarians produced by smoking all that human growth hormone. Jamaica on steroids.