Letters to the Editor
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Containment Unlikely
Genetic containment of pollinating, cross-breeding plants is practically ludicrous in the face of it. You'd need a biosecure facility, not a field.
And when the gene shows up in other people's fields, are the neighbors culpable for stealing, or is the originator culpable for contamination? I've read that this is already becoming an issue in India.
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finally, we agree :)
GM crops modified to contain pharmaceuticals should be closely watched and regulated. Though very few of them will pose a real risk to people, this is something to be concerned about.
The best point made in the Caruso article was that the best organisms to produce pharmaceuticals in would be non-food crops. How about poplars? Who would worry if we had cross-contamination of poplar species? Producing pharmaceuticals in plant species will make drugs cheaper and safer to use. But we need to ensure that we keep our food supply totally safe at the same time.
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Extremely important topic
Personally, I've got very little faith left in our regulatory bodies, especially those responsible for industry oversight of cutting-edge (read $$$) technologies. I just tried, to no avail, to find an article I once read on the birth of our regulatory agencies around the turn of the last century, which detailed how industry basically created such agencies as a means to disinvite closer scrutiny. [Maybe at poclad.org?] It was not the genesis of public oversight that I had somehow imagined, and as jaded as I'm becoming it was nonetheless kind of shocking and disheartening.
What frightens me most about the biopharm topic at hand, is that unlike, say, oversight for mine safety, the dangers being overlooked are biological in nature. More specifically, as concerned as I am about toxic wastes which affect biological systems, I am far more concerned with GMOs which don't just affect biological systems, but are part of them. I know this is stating the obvious, but the point that these are living entities interacting within their environments and not just ingredients on a shelf, cannot be stressed enough I feel.
Extrapolating experiences from GMO food crops isn't reassuring in the least. On the one hand, organic farmers are unable to protect their crops from GMO windborne contamination and the government views it as, essentially, their problem. On the other hand, GMO producers have been successful in seeking damage awards for the results of their own gene pollution. Clearly, the regulatory and legal decks are stacked.
Hoping to seal ourselves off from unwanted side-effects which GMOs may or may not someday cause by trying to limit modification to certain inedible species ignores the ecological interconnectivity of species which science does not yet fully understand. It's nice to imagine no ill side-effects forthcoming from the grand experiment that's been foisted upon us, but that's not a responsible position to take given our limited knowledge and the high stakes involved.
[Lastly, as a related aside ... what in the world are people, no matter how well-intentioned, thinking when they posit the delivery of vaccines to the Third World through, e.g. GMO bananas, etc.? Even if I thought GMOs were totally safe, such a scenario seems dubious at best just on the basis of logistics ... segregating such items from the food supply (if any), getting them delivered only to the target population, and dosing them properly.]
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Nothing to do with this post...
Any thoughts on why I haven't heard more about this:
http://www.buffalonews.com/145/story/50479.html
It's a story about how Dow Chemical is a buyout target by a group of investors that includes:
The newspaper said a bid could come this week, with half the financial backing coming from investors in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman, and half from U.S. investors.
It seems like when the UAE (or was it dubai) port buyout was in the works, bloggers (if not you in particular, but folks not unlike yourself) were going nuts over it WAY before it got this close...