Would You Like Drugs in Your Rice? 310
Digitus1337 writes "Wired has the scoop on a new type of rice that was just approved for production by a narrow vote. 'Ventria believes growing drugs that produce proteins like lactoferrin and lysozyme in rice could be a cheaper way to develop drugs than building and maintaining expensive manufacturing plants... Opponents say growing the crops in open fields endangers organic and conventional crops, as well as human health...'" Update: 03/30 23:15 GMT by T : That should probably read "growing rice that produces proteins like lactoferrin and lysozyme."
Re:Drug resistance? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Drug resistance? (Score:5, Informative)
given that these are naturally occuring proteins that everyone was exposed to as a child, i think the liklihood of bacteria developing a new resistance to them is low (otherwise, it would have happened sometime within the past several thousand years)
Don't forget after harvest (Score:5, Informative)
I personally don't have anything against generically engineered organisms, only that you have to be very careful managing them. While they shouldn't be able to compete as well as "natural" varieties, all it takes are a few big screw-ups to destroy the industry.
Indoor growing helps, as do a number of other controls that can be put in place. Moderate regulation is a good thing, in my opinion.
Better yet... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Drug rice... (Score:5, Informative)
The species that are being made for the betterment of mankind typically are done to rectify dietary defficiencies in a given population. For example, vitamin A rice [soilassociation.org] for developing countries which often have large populations of people who don't get enough vitamin A (lack of causes blindness). The rice in this particular story isn't meant to be used to better all people, but (as i read it) to be a supplement for babies who are not breast-feeding (as it was engineered to have proteins naturally occuring in breast milk).
The problem with genetically engineering crops isn't that we are "babying" our immune system (that's a separate issue mostly involving the overuse of antibiotics). Rather, the problem is the overreliance on single species (such as the vitamin A rice) and the lack of natural diversity. Eventually an opportunistic pest is going to come along and decimate your rice field; a condition that would be limited if multiple strains of rice were to be grown.
Re:Drug resistance? (Score:3, Informative)
Lysozyme is next to useless as a drug because the molecule is too big to be absorbed and move around the body. It's really more like a kind of natural preservative for bodily fluids (such as milk, or mucous). I'm not sure about lactoferrin but I suspect it's the same story.
What I do know is that lactoferrin has recently been approved for testing as an antimicrobial agent for shipping and storing beef and other foods. In fact it's more likely to be accepted if it's from a GMO plant crop than sourced from animals, since vCJD has people rightly concerned about the latter process (reusing or combining animal products).
Lysozyme can be used in the same way, as a food preservative. Hell, you could clean floors with these things, put them in "antibacterial" soaps (which do more harm [metrokc.gov] than good but I digress), etc. That sounds like a lot bigger and more lucrative market for industrially growing and extracting it, but it's likely not to come off quite so sympathetic in the press as making sure cute little babies are healthy.
Re:Drug rice... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Hey dude... (Score:5, Informative)
I think you mean gynecomastia. [m-w.com] Women don't get it, so I'd be more concerned about our young sons looking like young daughters, more than anything else. But your point is taken. Messing with the natural way of things hasn't always worked in ways we have intended. Putting iodine in salt worked pretty well, but the creation of a rice-based pharmacy when a substantial number of people depend on rice as their sole staple does merit some cause for concern, IMHO.
Re:Hey dude... (Score:2, Informative)
Debris? Yes. Wild rice? No. So-called wild rice (Zizania aquatica) isn't even related to cultivated rice (Oryza sativa). They wouldn't likely be found together.
Even eating organic rice will not save you, since small amounts of rice seeds will surely drift on the winds and contaminate all crops.
Drifting seeds are not the problem. Drifting pollen is. I would hope that the researchers growing this rice would be very careful to prevent its escape into the environment, but given the profit motive and the unchecked spread [sciencenews.org] of modified genes into traditional varieties of plants, it may be a lost cause. Or, to use a farm-country simile, it may be like closing the barn door after the horse is gone.
Re:Remember Percy Schmeiser? (Score:1, Informative)
"Yet the real story was not quite that clear cut. In court, Schmeiser claimed that, when spraying Roundup along the edge of a field to control weeds, he had inadvertently discovered Roundup resistant canola plants in one of his 1997 fields (Roundup Ready canola varieties had been first sold to Canadian farmers with much hoopla the preceding year). To examine this further, he then sprayed Roundup on a large portion of the same field and noted that many of the canola plants at the edge of the field survived. Schmeiser then saved the seeds from the plants that survived Roundup treatment and used those seeds to plant his entire 1000 acres the next year (1998). Tests on samples taken from Schmeiser's fields by Monsanto inspectors, from samples of his harvest collected by a local mill, and from court-ordered samples of all of his 1998 fields revealed that 95 to 99% of Schmeiser's 1998 crop was genetically engineered!
On March 29, 2001 a Saskatchewan federal judge found Schmeiser guilty of patent infringement, ruling that:
"[Schmeiser] seeded that [1998] crop from seed saved in 1997 which he knew or ought to have known was Roundup tolerant, and samples of plants from that seed were found to contain the plaintiff's patented claims for genes and cells. His infringement arises not simply from occasional or limited contamination of his Roundup susceptible canola by plants that are Roundup resistant. He planted his crop for 1998 with seed that he knew or ought to have known was Roundup tolerant.""
http://www.geo-pie.cornell.edu/issues/schmeiser
He gets a lot of sympathy because it's just a small farmer against a huge multi billion dollar company, and almost nobody listens to anything other than his side of the story.
OTOH I wouldn't want any crops to be growing drugs, because that's a threat to human health.
Re:Genetic material travels well (Score:3, Informative)
Most/many pollen grains are very small and can travel very far. I don't know of any pollen-specific studies offhand, but I guess they are out there. What I do know is that dust and ash travel is well documented. Ash from fires in Australia falls in New Zealand; dust from volcanoes encircles the world. Pollen will easily move from one island to another.
As for viability, there are many documented cases of seeds over 1000 years old being germinated.
Re:GM products (Score:3, Informative)
Re:A Potential Problem (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.geo-pie.cornell.edu/issues/schmeiser
Here's a ruling on his one of his cases
http://decisions.fct-cf.gc.ca/fct/2002/2002fca3
" [22] In late June or early July of 1997, Mr. Schmeiser and his employee Carlyle Moritz hand sprayed Roundup around power poles and in the ditches along the Bruno road where it bordered fields 1, 2, 3 and 4. This was part of his normal weed control practice. Several days after the spraying, he noticed that a large number of canola plants had survived the spraying. To determine why the canola plants had survived the Roundup spraying, Mr. Schmeiser conducted a test in field 2. Using a machine sprayer set to spray 40 feet, he sprayed Roundup on a section of field 2 in a strip along the road. He made two passes, the first weaving between and around the power poles and the second adjacent to the first pass, parallel to the power poles. He testified that by this means he sprayed a good three acres of field 2. According to Mr. Schmeiser's evidence, after some days, approximately 60% of the canola plants sprayed were still alive, growing in clumps that were thickest near the road and thinner as one moved into the field.
[23] At harvest time in 1997 Mr. Schmeiser, who was then recovering from a leg injury, instructed Mr. Moritz to swath and combine field 2. Mr. Moritz did so, harvesting the canola in the field as well as the surviving canola along the roadside. The harvested seed was put into the box of a 1962 Ford pickup truck. The box was covered with a tarp and the truck with its tarped load of canola seed was stored in one of Mr. Schmeiser's buildings over the winter.
[24] Mr. Schmeiser testified that in the spring of 1998 the seed from the Ford truck was transferred to another truck and taken to the Humboldt Flour Mill for treatment, a normal process to rid the seeds of disease before planting. The treated seed, mixed with untreated seed from his granary ("bin-run seed"), was planted in all or part of each of his nine fields, for a total of 1,030 acres."
"On consideration of the evidence adduced, and the submissions, oral and written, on behalf of the parties I conclude that the plaintiffs' action is allowed and some of the remedies they seek should be granted. These reasons set out the bases for my conclusions, in particular my finding that, on the balance of probabilities, the defendants infringed a number of the claims under the plaintiffs' Canadian patent number 1,313,830 by planting, in 1998, without leave or licence by the plaintiffs, canola fields with seed saved from the 1997 crop which seed was known, or ought to have been known by the defendants to be Roundup tolerant and when tested was found to contain the gene and cells claimed under the plaintiffs' patent. By selling the seed harvested in 1998 the defendants further infringed the plaintiffs' patent."
Re:Hey dude... a couple basic questions (Score:4, Informative)
As for prions, not a lot is understood about them. It seems like they work by denaturing proteins, thus shutting down cell functions and generating more prions. They only seem to be a problem for nerve tissue, perhaps because of its low rate of division, but no one really knows. Also, while they do seem to be a large problem for herbivores (mad cow, chronic wasting disease, and a few other variants) they don't seem to have much of an effect on the carnivores that eat those herbivores. This seems to be true of people as well. Despite the fact that many millions of people (in Britain and elsewhere) have been exposed to BSE contaminated beef, there have only been a few thousand reported cases of vCJD.
Some researchers believe that natural herds of animals rely on carnivores to remove the animals with chronic wasting. While human hunters usually select the largest, healthiest animals, carnivores typically target the smallest, or weakest animals. This is a theory that will be soon put to the test as the elk herds in Yellowstone become infected with the chronic wasting epidemic that is sweeping northward through the Rocky Mountains. Researchers have noted chronic wasting starting to appear in the elk herds in Teton National Park, which borders Yellowstone on the south.
Also, CJD (the original kind of CJD which hits people in the later years of their life) seems to be tied to prions, but doesn't seem to be a problem for young people. CJD hasn't been tied to exposure to BSE, it seems that some people just get it later in life.