KeJia Sista
Jun 6th, 2005, 08:27 PM
Mommy, Is Aunt Sally in the Rice Puffs?
by DON FITZ
Would you rather find a finger in your chili or guzzle human DNA in beer? In
the recent furor over "pharmed" rice in Missouri, something is being
downplayed: corporations are proposing to put human DNA into plants whose neighboring
cousins could end up being eaten (or drunk) by people.
"Pharming" involves inserting human or animal genes into plants. Ventria
Bioscience wants to plant 204.5 acres of rice, which would be the largest pharmed
crop in the world and would dwarf the typical pharmaceutical field of less
than an acre.
The plan provoked storms of controversy. Environmentalists charged that
pharmaceutical rice could be spread by cross-pollination, floods, birds, rice
grains in farm equipment, or human error in distribution. Risks include allergic
reactions, aggravation of bacterial infections and auto-immune disorders.
Ventria sought to reassure rice farmers that contamination of neighboring
fields is unlikely. But farmers remember that contamination caused loses with
StarLink corn in 2000, Nebraska soybeans in 2002 and pharmaceutical corn in Iowa.
The deeper side to the story has received little attention. The public is
not being asked "Do you want human genes in what you eat and drink?"
Perhaps beer drinkers are not the only ones who don't want to taste a little
bit of Uncle Fred. Maybe mommies don't want to give their darlings wee
morsels of Aunt Sally in their rice puffs before waving them off to school.
This brings to mind a problem which plagued the meat packing industry a
century ago. Upton Sinclair wrote in The Jungle that sometimes packinghouse
workers "Öfell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough
of them left to be worth exhibiting, sometimes they would be overlooked for
days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure
Leaf Lard!"
Most people would see eating a finger in a bowl of chili as cannibalism. But
what about the tip of a finger? If you eat food cooked with lard which
includes fragments of a packinghouse worker, is that cannibalism?
Is it cannibalism to eat food with one human gene? What about 50 human genes
or an entire human chromosome? How much human material must be spliced into
a living organism to render its products "essentially human?"
To use the language of the genetic engineering industry, we could say that
human DNA in rice is "substantively equivalent" to human flesh in hamburger
meat. Of course, there are differences. Genes are incredibly small in comparison
to boiled human flesh. But those human genes would be present in every cell
of every contaminated plant you put into your mouth.
This is not something that suddenly arose with Ventria rice in Missouri.
Researchers have been putting human genes into animals for years for medical
purposes, such as trying to make pig hearts human-compatible.
Scientists with the US Department of Agriculture put human growth hormone
genes into pig embryos to produce faster growing hogs. The project did not stop
because its originators stayed awake at night pondering the morality of what
they were doing. Rather, it was abandoned because the resulting pigs were so
deformed that some could not support their own weight.
But other laboratories could well overcome these failures and successfully
implant even more human material into plants and animals. If one gene worked
pretty well, could 20, 100 or 1000 genes work even better? In 1997, Japanese
researchers reported inserting a complete human chromosome into mice to produce
human antibodies.
Eating food with human genes conflicts with moral or religious beliefs of
many people. Even those who do not share their views defend their right to
practice their beliefs. All genetically modified food should be labeled so that
those who choose not to consume it can do so. But the last thing you are likely
to see on beer, rice puffs, or pharmaceuticals is a statement that "This
product contains human genetic material."
If the biotech industry gets its way, there may soon be human DNA in every
rice product on the shelf. Once human genes get into a plant, they become a
permanent part of that species. When Grandpa is spliced into a pollinating
plant, he just keeps blowin' in the wind forever. His DNA becomes part of the diet
of all who eat the plant. Unlike exploding gas tanks, Grandpa's genes can't
be recalled.
Don Fitz is on the National Committee of the Green Party USA and is Outreach
Coordinator for the Missouri Green Party. He can be reached at
fitzdon@aol.com.
Ke Jia
by DON FITZ
Would you rather find a finger in your chili or guzzle human DNA in beer? In
the recent furor over "pharmed" rice in Missouri, something is being
downplayed: corporations are proposing to put human DNA into plants whose neighboring
cousins could end up being eaten (or drunk) by people.
"Pharming" involves inserting human or animal genes into plants. Ventria
Bioscience wants to plant 204.5 acres of rice, which would be the largest pharmed
crop in the world and would dwarf the typical pharmaceutical field of less
than an acre.
The plan provoked storms of controversy. Environmentalists charged that
pharmaceutical rice could be spread by cross-pollination, floods, birds, rice
grains in farm equipment, or human error in distribution. Risks include allergic
reactions, aggravation of bacterial infections and auto-immune disorders.
Ventria sought to reassure rice farmers that contamination of neighboring
fields is unlikely. But farmers remember that contamination caused loses with
StarLink corn in 2000, Nebraska soybeans in 2002 and pharmaceutical corn in Iowa.
The deeper side to the story has received little attention. The public is
not being asked "Do you want human genes in what you eat and drink?"
Perhaps beer drinkers are not the only ones who don't want to taste a little
bit of Uncle Fred. Maybe mommies don't want to give their darlings wee
morsels of Aunt Sally in their rice puffs before waving them off to school.
This brings to mind a problem which plagued the meat packing industry a
century ago. Upton Sinclair wrote in The Jungle that sometimes packinghouse
workers "Öfell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough
of them left to be worth exhibiting, sometimes they would be overlooked for
days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure
Leaf Lard!"
Most people would see eating a finger in a bowl of chili as cannibalism. But
what about the tip of a finger? If you eat food cooked with lard which
includes fragments of a packinghouse worker, is that cannibalism?
Is it cannibalism to eat food with one human gene? What about 50 human genes
or an entire human chromosome? How much human material must be spliced into
a living organism to render its products "essentially human?"
To use the language of the genetic engineering industry, we could say that
human DNA in rice is "substantively equivalent" to human flesh in hamburger
meat. Of course, there are differences. Genes are incredibly small in comparison
to boiled human flesh. But those human genes would be present in every cell
of every contaminated plant you put into your mouth.
This is not something that suddenly arose with Ventria rice in Missouri.
Researchers have been putting human genes into animals for years for medical
purposes, such as trying to make pig hearts human-compatible.
Scientists with the US Department of Agriculture put human growth hormone
genes into pig embryos to produce faster growing hogs. The project did not stop
because its originators stayed awake at night pondering the morality of what
they were doing. Rather, it was abandoned because the resulting pigs were so
deformed that some could not support their own weight.
But other laboratories could well overcome these failures and successfully
implant even more human material into plants and animals. If one gene worked
pretty well, could 20, 100 or 1000 genes work even better? In 1997, Japanese
researchers reported inserting a complete human chromosome into mice to produce
human antibodies.
Eating food with human genes conflicts with moral or religious beliefs of
many people. Even those who do not share their views defend their right to
practice their beliefs. All genetically modified food should be labeled so that
those who choose not to consume it can do so. But the last thing you are likely
to see on beer, rice puffs, or pharmaceuticals is a statement that "This
product contains human genetic material."
If the biotech industry gets its way, there may soon be human DNA in every
rice product on the shelf. Once human genes get into a plant, they become a
permanent part of that species. When Grandpa is spliced into a pollinating
plant, he just keeps blowin' in the wind forever. His DNA becomes part of the diet
of all who eat the plant. Unlike exploding gas tanks, Grandpa's genes can't
be recalled.
Don Fitz is on the National Committee of the Green Party USA and is Outreach
Coordinator for the Missouri Green Party. He can be reached at
fitzdon@aol.com.
Ke Jia