Agencies

Brooklin, December 31:

Medicine and farming are merging as genetically engineered (GE) maize and soy crops promise cheap drugs, but they also threaten to contaminate food and the environment, warn activists and experts.

The United States has planted very small amounts of these experimental ‘pharma crops’ since the early 1990s, including about 18 hector (ha) in 2004, according to the US department of agriculture. Although full-scale production is a few years away, a new report is warning that when it begins, the US food supply will be contaminated sooner or later.

“It is sobering that drugs and industrial chemicals could have so many routes to the food supply,” said David Andow, the report’s editor and a professor at the University of Minnesota.

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), an environmental non-governmental organisation (NGO) that asked six independent scientists to prepare the report, is calling for an immediate ban on the field production of food or feed crops engineered to produce pharmaceuticals and industrial chemicals.

‘Biopharming’ is a subset of biotechnology that turns ordinary plants and animals into protein production factories through genetic engineering. Until recently nearly all drugs were manufactured via synthetic chemical processes. But in the last 20 years the science of biotechnology has led to a new class of drugs called ‘bio-pharmaceuticals’ — therapeutic proteins produced by living cells through microbial fermentation or mammalian cell culture.

The most successful of these has been GE (also known as GM or genetically modified) insulin, which is used by millions of diabetics around the world.

In the early 1980s a human gene for insulin production was stitched into the DNA (the building blocks of the cells of all living things) of the bacteria E coli. With a much lower manufacturing cost, this process completely overtook the traditional source of insulin — the pancreas of cows and pigs.

Thousands of diabetics have experienced bad reactions and many have died as a result of this new GE insulin, called synthetic or ‘human’ insulin, according to the Society for Diabetic Rights.