Drug Making Genes Added To Corn Jump To Soya 510
Anonymous Cowdog writes "Google News turned up a scary item today: Apparently, genetically altered corn, designed not to repel pests or withstand bad weather, but rather to grow pharmecuticals (for diabetes and diarrhea) has been accidentally mixed with soy plants in the field, resulting in 500,000 bushels of contaminated soybeans being quarantined by the US FDA. Ooops. Here's the story, and here's another story about the same case. The company who brought us this nice event is called ProdiGene. Looks like they're also working on an edible AIDS vaccine (kinda makes sense, eat Tofu, enjoy free love!) Now, I was thinking, will our government protect us from doom-by-hand-me-down-genes? and on a hunch (honest!) I did this google search for keywords ProdiGene and "george w bush". Result? A not so reassuring article."
Caution... (Score:5, Informative)
The potential hazards combined with the legal tanglements of a company being
able to hold a patent on seeds, so far, hasn't been worth it. Perhaps now, the
na-sayers who derided the decision of the leader of that African country to
refuse genetically altered foodstuffs have some "food for thought". Sorry, pun
intended.
SealBeater
Article doesn't mention gene jumping (Score:4, Informative)
interview with CEO of ProdiGene (Score:1, Informative)
Anthony G. Laos, president and chief executive of ProdiGene, Inc. was appointed by President George W. Bush to serve as a member of the Board for International Food and Agriculture Development (BIFAD). Mr. Laos will serve a four-year term, expiring on July 28, 2005.
BIFAD, which consists of seven members all appointed by the President, provides advice to the Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) on international food issues such as agriculture and food security. BIFAD also assists and advises the U.S. Government Inter-Agency Working Group on Food Security in carrying out commitments made in the U.S. Country Paper for the November 1996 World Food Summit and on the Plan of Action agreed to at the summit.
"I am honored to be appointed to this position by President Bush," Laos says. " I welcome the opportunity to work with my fellow colleagues in promoting USAID policy and increasing world food production." ProdiGene, headquartered in College Station, TX, is a private biotechnology company that is developing and manufacturing industrial and pharmaceutical proteins from a transgenic plant system.
Trypsin? (Score:4, Informative)
The bio-corn - which is grown to produce trypsin and another compound to treat diarrhea - has not been approved for human or livestock feed.
Trypsin is a primary digestive enzyme in stomachs. I wonder what could possible go wrong with ingesting more trypsin, even if it was from another species. This other compound used to treat diarrhea couldn't be that bad either. I don't see what the real problem here is besides the small potential that someone might be allergic to this protein. I know that the FDA has to be conservative but there is no real need for a scare.
Sorry for replying as an Anonymous Coward
Re:Caution... (Score:5, Informative)
Not so much 'jumping'... (Score:5, Informative)
It seems to me we're going to have to do a damn sight more than simply field-separation to make sure that pharmaceutical compounds don't get into the food chain... But more than likely there'll be a spate of reassuring press releases and the world will get back to normal. *sigh*
Misleading Headline (Score:5, Informative)
What Happened: Parts of the harvested corn plants got mixed in with harvested soy beans. The resulting mixed product is contamnated, because people eating the soy product will eat some of the corn, getting the resulting altered genes in the soy.
What the headline "Drug Making Genes Added To Corn Jump To Soya" makes one think happened: genes from the corn plant somehow spontaneously or voluntarily integrated themselves into the soy plant's genes. This did not happen!
Gene Swapping (Score:5, Informative)
Increasing Problem (Score:3, Informative)
The frightening thing is that this is very likely to become far more common as more and more genetically engineered crops are developed and their use becomes more widespread. So far, the mix-ups have been caught, or so we hope. But, the likelyhood of such crops escaping into the consumer market and the wild is rapidly increasing and the unknown dangers that go with them are frightening.
Man has always tampered with nature with many disaterous results to show for it. The transplanting of non-native species has almost always resulted in a proliferation of the species which then becomes a niusance. Think killer bees, cane toads, rabies, lethal yellowing, dutch elm disease, citrus canker etc...
No one knows what negative effects these genetically altered crops will present in the future. All that we do know is that the opportunity for disaster is enormous.
Re:Misleading headline (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.organicconsumers.org/gefood/gegut071
Re:Trypsin? (Score:1, Informative)
You know what's the EU's problem with the GM food manufacturers?
It's not that the EU wouldn't want to let GM food in its markets. It's the refusal of the GM food manufacturers to label their food as modified.
So, in sense, they're trying to force us to eat GM food.
Re:Genes DO Jump Species... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Misleading headline (Score:4, Informative)
Genes sometimes do make interspecies jumps: at least in the lab, bacteria can transduce genes from one species to another. A bacterial plasmid (small circular piece of DNA) integrated into a host genome can excise a small part of the host's genome, replicate, and reintegrate into another host's genome, even if the second host is of a different species. Plasmid integration is fairly common in plants, and integration of the T-plasmid from B. thuringiensis is the basis for most pest-resistant crops.
Transposons could also potentially transduce genetic materials between species.
Re:Gene Swapping (Score:2, Informative)
You have bacteriophages, viruses that can penetrate a bacterial cell, recombine with it's chromosome, eventually pulling out of the chromosome, killing the cell while doing it and taking some of the bacterial dna with them and repeating this (next recombination will include the dna from previously killed bacteria).
Bacteria can also have small chromosomes called plasmids that can have some interesting properties (such as resistance for antibiotics, etc.) If bacteria has an F plasmid it can have "sex" with a F- bacteria thus transferring it's reproduction capabilities and maybe something else too. This is how bacteria that due to some random mutation get resistant to antibiotics can spread this capability rather rapidly in a hospital.
Bactetria can also pick up random dna at will and integrate it into their chromosome thus maybe bringing in some useful capabilities. There are classic examples about this that anyone who took an introductory college biology course should know..
Re:Misleading headline (Score:2, Informative)
go worry about something else (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Caution... (Score:2, Informative)
Genetically altered FUD (Score:5, Informative)
Well, that's called traditional cross-breeding, and it's been practiced by humans intentionally and unintentionally pretty much since the day when we started building mud huts and stopped following animals around.
The reaction to genetically altered foods in this country (and Europe), espcially the reaction of people of reason, is baffling to me.
When these "big bad" bio companies modify plant genes in an effort to create products, they're doing it with a kind of specificity that was unthinkable 10 years ago. They modify a handful of genes, and they know the exact outcome of that modification.
Is it possible some of these modified genes will "jump" to another plant species? Yes. In fact, it's likely, especially if the plants are grown outdoors rather than in a greenhouse. Is that bad? Maybe. But probably not, and it most cases, it's no more dangerous than the situation created when plants are cross-bred in the "traditional" (read: random) way to produce desireable traits.
Bioengineering faces a lot of hurdles, but one hurdle it should not have to face is educated people rising up in terror [dailynewstribune.com] against the benefits it could provide.
Did any of you greenies READ the articles? (Score:5, Informative)
And the other one,
"The USDA quarantined the soybeans in Nebraska after discovering the possible contamination during harvest last month. Investigators suspect the contamination occurred when a small amount of ProdiGene's corn plants mixed in with soybeans subsequently grown on the same field and adjacent fields. In Iowa, the company was ordered to destroy 155 acres (63 hectares) of corn in September because windborne pollen from its bio-corn may have contaminated nearby fields."
No gene transfer, no mutations, no animated Frankencorn coming for your children. Just some self-catch corn plants in a soyabean field which were either not removed before harvest (unlikely) or were removed at a time later decided by some dickhead bureaucrat to be the wrong time (very likely).
In Iowa we have a case of definite burocratitis, where one guy officially blessed the planting and another guy said "NONONO!!!" later on, after the corn was in the ground. No evidence of actual contamination in Iowa was found in the articles, just potential for it.
So what we actually have here is the politically motivated attempt by the agriculture bureaucrats to bankrupt a perfectly reasonable company, one which is following all the rules.
So all you Greenie boys and girls need to read the friggin article, and possibly go read up on gene transfer technology.
Re:ever ehard of cross polinisation ? (Score:5, Informative)
If the crop had been seed soybeans (ie. meant for next year's planting, not for eating) and the contaminant had been lima beans (not easily separated from soybeans by seed cleaning processes), the crop would have been "ruined" for planting purposes, because seed is expected to be free of "weeds" (defined as any unwanted plant -- mustard is a "weed" most places). Same principle, but that wouldn't have made good argument-fodder!!
Get your facts straight... (Score:4, Informative)
Genetically-modified corn was planted in a small field. Soybeans were planted in that field the next growing cycle. Volunteer corn from the previous crop sprung up with the soybeans. The company did not weed out the volunteer corn, and at harvest time a small amount of corn was gathered with the soybeans and eventually mixed with 500 tons of soybeans in a silo.
The modified genes being detected are in the corn kernels, not the soybeans.
What's wrong with GMO's? (Score:4, Informative)
Additionally, for those people who are horrified by the idea of eating GMO's, I'd like to tell you a little secret that has been withheld from you. VIRTUALLY EVERYTHING YOU EAT TODAY HAS BEEN GENETICALLY MODIFIED BY HUMANS. For example, give me one example of a wild cabbage plant, (if you can find this, then you will realize what else was created from its ancestor). Or, since we are on the subject, has anyone seen a real wild corn plant or Soybean plant? The reason we have them today, is because long ago selective breeding made them what they are. The only difference with Genetically Modifying an organism is that it can accomplish a variety of plant in a much smaller amount of time. Additionally, while GMO's synthetically splice new DNA, which in turn creates new organic compounds, selective breeding HAS THE SAME EFFECT ON PLANTS.
anyways, I'm stepping off the soapbox now
Re:Gene Swapping (Score:5, Informative)
Don't have the exact case handy, but a farmer planting non-GMO corn next to a "Roundup" GMO corn crop of his neighbor noticed that one patch near the border had become resistant to his herbicide. The neighbor's corn had bred with his, making his corn resistant.
He called up Monsanto, producer of Roundup, and told them about it. They came out, noticed the same thing, then pressed charges for theft of product. The farmer called them! Eventually, he counter-sued for crop-contamination, trespass, and a whole bunch of other things and Monsanto went away.
Standard Google search on Monsanto, GMO, Roundup, etc. brings up all sorts of interesting stuff.
Re:ever ehard of cross polinisation ? (Score:4, Informative)
Cross-pollination, certainly not in the field, just isn't going to happen between corn and soy. The reasons are almost too many to list...wrong number of chromosomes, lack of homology between chromosomes, mistiming of flowering, various forms of genetic incompatibility, etc. You might be able to coax some sort of a sad deformed thing out of protoplast fusion or some such thing, but I'd be against it, and even if you could, you'd be lucky if you could get it to live at all outside of a lab.
Re:ever ehard of cross polinisation ? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Misleading headline (Score:3, Informative)
But to see if GM DNA might be transferred via bacteria to the intestine, they also took bacteria from stools in the colostomy bags and cultivated them. In three of the seven samples they found bacteria had taken up the herbicide-resistant gene from the GM food at a very low level.
What does "very low level" mean? The scientists say this is not alarming at all (if they had show genetic splicing going on in the human digestive tract, I'd imagine they'd be going for a Nobel prize)... the only people who find this a big deal is a group called "Friends of the Earth".
So, what happened? Somebody misread a scientific report, I'd imagine.
--
Evan
Stop spreading misinformation and learn the facts (Score:4, Informative)
JUMPING is still common (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Gene Swapping (Score:2, Informative)
Re:ever ehard of cross polinisation ? (Score:3, Informative)
Perhaps you shouldn't be so sure that the barriers that are so obvious in your model of the world accurately reflect reality. You assume too much.
It took me more time to copy'n'paste the quote than it did to find this article using Google, and this was just the first of over 60,000 hits on "cross species gene transfer". Anyone who bothers to look will see that this is one of the earlier papers on the subject, from 1985. There has been quite a bit of activity in the last 17 years.
Cross species transfers of genetic material happen. That is why there is a debate about the risks to benefit ratios of using this technology outside the laboratory. The new genes are not added to just corn, but to a complex stew of multiple species, when this is done in the dirt.
How does cross-pollenation work? (Score:5, Informative)
Cross-pollenation occurs between plants of the same species. Cross-pollentation is where the pollen of two different corn plants of two different lineages are intentionally introduced to each other. This is the same idea as people marrying somebody from the next town over, rather than their cousin.
The pollen of a corn plant, cannot, under any circumstances, land on a soybean flower and create a seed. Two different species cannot create viable offspring unless they are very closely related (where they produce a cross-species hybrid, such as a mule), and even then these offspring are always infertile.
Genetic Modification still has to follow the laws of biology. No matter what the source of the genes, you can't just put two species in close proximity and have genes cross from one to the other. You really do have to have all that spiffy lab equipment and clever people with test-tubes and droppers and microscopes and so forth.
The genes of the corn plants did not contaminate the soy.
So what's the fuss about? Well, those corn plants were producing diabetes and diahorrea drugs. These drugs are probably not something that you really want healthy people taking, as it could possibly have adverse effects. The soy was planted in feilds that contained the GM corn previously. A few of the seeds left over from the previous planting sprouted when the soy was planted. Now it is entirely possible that these corn plants could still be producing these drugs. This is relatively harmless in the wild where they won't be coming into contact with people, but when they're growing in the middle of food-plants, its possible the soy could absorb some of the drugs, simply due to their proximity. This is a legitimate concern, not becuase of some possible 'genetic contamination', but the more mundane but infinitely more plausible pharmecuetical contamination. You won't get soybeans that produce the chemicals themselves, but they might pick up the chemicals from the nearby corn.
The reason that the food manufacturers are upset about using food-plants for pharmaceuticals is that you don't want people eating corn that's been producing diabetes drugs. Eating a tortilla which messes with your insulin levels would be a Bad Thing. There's no reason these drugs couldn't be produced in, say, millet, which nobody on this continent eats as a food. Therefore, nobody accidentally takes drug-millet and makes cornbread from it, becuase nobody eats it anyway. You still wouldn't want to grow soy in that field the next season, though, for the reasons put forth above.
I'd kinda like to see the
Re:ever ehard of cross polinisation ? (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps these "lot of people" should find themselves ANY evidence of a gene crossing plant species.
This is allready proofed since 20 years.
Plant genes hop. This is well known in biology, only the genetic engineers do not know it. Or claim so.
Even among animals or humans, genes hop. They get spread via virii.
Plants however are very tricky, they are able to incorporate new mutated genes from neighbouriung plants of the same breed without the need of using a virus as transportation.
That means: a old tree is able to profit from younger trees around him wich mutate due to "strange conditions" by picking up the mutated genes those plants release.
The transportation mechanism is unknonw to me (did not read those papers). But I remember to have read that some 15 years ago when I still was at school. This was BEFORE that whole gen manipulation in food plants was an issue.
It should not be that hard to make a search for the PHDs involved about that research.
E.g. this german language page I found via google:
http://www.unifr.ch/biochem/BIOTECH/BIO_
It references a lot of scientific articels, in german, french and italian, as well as in spanish. Somve cover the migration of genes viapolinisation and others by "jumping". Its a real old fact that a field of plants will conterminate each sommer about 1% of ALL surrounding plants regardless of species with new genes.
It seems that the "newness" of the genes are a motivation to "try them out" by the contaminated plants. At least: they do not incorporate "standard" genes of neighbours, but somehow they have a record wich genes are new and might be worth a try.
angel'o'sphere
lateral gene transfer (Score:2, Informative)
If you haven't read "Mutant" by Peter Clement, do so. Genetic engineering is a nightmare waiting to happen. While "Mutant" is a fictional book, everything in it is quite possible, and I looked up everything in it at both the library in medical journals and online. Scary as hell, and the companies doing all the experimentation don't want you to know how dangerous it really is.
The *REAL* Frankenfoods (Score:5, Informative)
You can do a number if interesting things. Trees that produce more than one kind of fruit. Potato plants that sprout tomatoes. Curious cacti.
The technique has more than novelty value. In the late nineteenth century, a louse (phylloxera) was inadvertantly imported to Europe, and it loved to feast on the roots of the wine grape plant (vitis vinifera). We wouldn't have wines from France, or Germany, or Italy, if the viticulturalists of the day hadn't grafted some of the vinifera stalks on to roots of more phylloxera-resistant species. That's right--your glass of Pinot Noir is Frankenfood.
Grafting can go awry, however. There was an incident in Tennessee a number of years ago involving a farmer who wanted his tomatoes to better cope with early fall frosts. He grafted a tomato vine to a local weed. Voila--tomatoes later in the season. His neighbour thought it was a great idea and performed the same trick. Unfortunately, when he shared the fruits of his labour with his family, they all ended up in the emergency ward with high fevers and hallucinations.
It turns out that the plant to which both farmers had grafted their tomatoes was jimsonweed (datura stramonium) which produces psychoactive chemicals in its leaves. Because of different pruning practices, the second farmer's tomatoes contained a much higher concentration of the active ingredient, leading to the poisoning. For more details, consult The Medical Detectives, Berton Roueche, Plume, 1991).
Despite the risks of unpredicted reactions (even after centuries of use), grafting is an accepted and essential part of modern agriculture. We don't have angry demonstrators storming our grocery stores demanding the removal of foods and wine because grafting has been around so long. There may be small risks associated with GM foods--but because of intense public scrutiny, GM foods will be better characterized and more frequently tested than anything else on your plate.
Manufacturers will shy away from introducing obvious potential allergens (peanut proteins and the like, for example) to products for human consumption. Most GM crops are designed to be infertile anyway, severely limiting their spread.
Tempest in a teapot, people. Move along. The ethical sense of agribusiness can be questioned, but not their greed. Simply put, they're going to be damned careful about doing anything that might expose them to ruinously costly lawsuits.
Wrong. (Score:2, Informative)
The genes didn't jump: what they've "discovered" is that if you mash up the pharaceutical corn in soybeans, the corn's constituents show up in the mashed soybeans.
Cripes.