tisiwoota

From patenting entire plants, Monsanto has apparently moved on to patenting pigs?

In today’s news I learned of a project to genetically alter cottonwood trees to help clean the environment by taking up mercury from surrounding contaminated soil. As well as contributing an environmental service, if successful this removal method would slash clean-up costs from about $2 million per acre to $200,00 per acre. Trees are also being engineered to remove selenium deposits and boost carbon retention to combat global warming.

While I hope this is effective, it’s impossible not to notice what a PR-savvy move this is for the industry. It will be much harder to raise significant resistance to GM crops as the technology becomes ever more deeply insinuated into necessary/politically popular causes…

Researchers at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York have developed a new cancer treatment using a genetically engineered oncolytic Herpes simplex virus (oHSV) to selectively kill cancer cells while sparing normal tissue.

Honestly, now:

What sort of parents give their child a name like Percy?

Could there be a name more likely to destine its bearer to play the scrawnier role in a David vs. Goliath story?

The saga of Percy Schmeiser began in 1998, (more…)

Having already looked at the question of why people can’t patent themselves, it’s time to branch out across the evolutionary tree and ask: “what’s the big deal with patenting genetically-modified plants?”

One reason this has been a contentious issue is the trickiness of figuring out what, exactly, has been patented.

Is it:
a) just the inserted transgene, or
b) the whole plant?

This question was one of the topics I explored in a final paper for a senior-year elective in property law. In the course of my research, I came across a review (authored by Nathan Busch) which compared the insertion of a transgene in a plant to the “mere” addition of a lever to a watch, based on the finding below from an old court case:

“The inventor of the patent lever, without doubt, added a very useful improvement to it; but his right to a patent could not be more extensive than his invention. The patent could not cover the whole machine as improved, but barely the actual improvement.”
(more…)

If my alma mentor Paul Ewald had a grave to be lying in, he would probably be rolling over in it right now in response to how long it took me to think about what sort of role infectious disease might have to play in genetic engineering issues. Back in college, looking at everything through the lens of evolutionary medicine became second-nature. Now, not so much. It wasn’t until reading a news item about three transplant patients dying from a hamster-borne virus that I thought to wonder whether the development of chimeric creatures might facilitate interspecies disease transmission.

It’s unlikely that this would be much of a concern at the level of lab research– especially if changes are not germline, so that a chimeric population could not be created through reproduction. In any case, lab populations would likely be too small to allow for evolution of diseases that could use a chimera as an intermediary to jump between the contributing “pure” species.

But it would be a different story once sustainable breeding populations of chimerics hit the wild– or petstore supply lines (how big is the step from transgenic pets to genuine chimeras?). Still, in that scenario, only non-human species would be affected. Reading up on the potential use of chimeras to grow human organs for transplant, it seems that each animal would have to be specially designed to generate an organ that’s an exact genetic match to the human recipient. Though this practise would raise the usual interspecies risks (similar to the above, there is concern that latent viruses in one species might become activated in the other), it probably wouldn’t lead to any diseases specifically adapted to chimerics.

What the above does suggest is that there could be a risk in creating pets/wild populations of animals with human features. I can’t really think of any human features that it would be particularly amusing to have in a pet, or would represent much of an aesthetic enhancement– but suppose someone were to make a breed of cats that grow human fingers. That integration of instructions and components might be enough to spur the evolution of diseases that could cross species. Of course, it’s likely that simple moral repugnance at the idea of creating human-like animals for flippant purposes would prevent society from going down that path at all, so that we would not even get to the point where disease crossover would be an issue.

As the avian flu scare demonstrated, we still have a lot to learn about virus evolution and interspecies disease transmission. Will be interesting to see what chimerics might have to teach us in this regard…

A San Diego startup has devised a way to produce monoclonal antibody drugs on the cheap, using freshwater green algae that have been genetically-engineered to produce human-like proteins:

“The Rincon system involves introducing the gene sequence responsible for producing a particular human protein into the cells of the algae. Once there, the algae cell “reads” the human gene sequence and begins producing the protein.

The algae grow and multiply in a petrie dish, and then are transferred and grown in plastic bags of increasing size, all the way up to 25,000 liters. The algae are then harvested, and the human protein is extracted from the plant cells and purified.”

The process is approximately ten times cheaper than the traditional method of splicing engineered hamster or mouse cells with human DNA components.

1. Read this post, by some twisted wacko whom you probably shouldn’t trust with your pet monkey.

{1a. Optional background on the chimera experiments/issues.}

2. Now you’re ready to be updated on something I randomly stumbled across [well, if by ‘randomly’, you mean ‘by clicking the amazing filter-blog I check everysingleday’… but the timing of this topic turning up is quite a random coincidence…]:

It turns out the response of stem-cells to their microenvironment [a factor I vaguely speculated about in my comments to #1] is a hot topic right now.

Check this out:
“Some researchers argue that providing an appropriate three-dimensional environment in which signals come from the right direction will matter as much as using the right biochemicals.”

Of course embryonic stem cells are likely to be less picky about things than adult stem cells, but even so…

“Just injecting embryonic stem cells is probably not the way to go… Left to their own devices, they do their own thing and go in different directions.”

On the other hand, it seems that stem-cells themselves aren’t just helpless direction-following slaves:

“…Gage’s group has also found that mammalian neural stem cells are not such passive players in their microenvironment as the fruitfly germline stem cells studied by Spradling and Fuller. Andrew Wurmser, a postdoc in Gage’s lab, has found that neural stem cells can, under certain conditions, give rise to endothelial cells. This hints that, if the need arises, they may be able to populate their microenvironment with the support cells that they need to thrive.

Researchers led by Elaine Fuchs of Rockefeller University in New York have added further weight to the idea that some stem cells can create their own microenvironments. She has isolated individual epithelial stem cells, which give rise to skin and hair, and cultured them in the lab. When she subsequently grafted cells from these cultures into the skin of mutant hairless mice, they gave rise to hair follicles containing stem cells and support cells. The nude mice grew tufts of hair.”

…

So… What to conclude? It does seem that stem-cells are tricky enough that merely injecting human stem-cells into an animal brain probably won’t give them a substantially human-acting brain (as in fully sentient/conscious)– but could perhaps lead to something just human enough to make us morally uncomfortable. [Then again, as the article points out, in the wrong environment stem-cells can be wiped out or turn cancerous– The survival of the small sample injected in Weissman’s initial experiment doesn’t necessarily indicate that total replacement would even create a functional whole…]

Wow, what a dizzying topic…

Via InfoServe, AllAfrica has an overview of the GM debate in Zambia:

“In 2002 the Zambian government shocked many by returning emergency food aid just when million of Zambians faced starvation. The reason: the package contained potentially unsafe GM maize. Three years on, an audit of the manner in which the GM ‘debate’ was played out in the national media offers important insights.”

According to the article, the government based its decision not on local health or environmental concerns, but was rather swayed by agricultural export lobbyists. That’s a real shame, and not something anti-GM groups should hold up proudly as a victory. On any other issue, I would think that members of such groups would be appalled if European business concerns were to drive a developing country’s decision about how to respond to an emergency situation.

I respect that there are legitimate concerns about GM food, and am skeptical about claims by GM producers that their technology will put an end to hunger (since hunger is more often a problem of distribution than supply), but still, it’s worrisome when a movement is willing to put its principles above more basic ones and immediate human needs.

…

In regards to the wider context, my opinions on the GM debate are mixed: On the one hand, the integrity of science has suffered greatly from the conflicts of interest posed by corporate funding, and the impartiality of internal reviews is often dubious (think, for example, of GlaxoSmithKline’s decade-long suppression of findings about the lethal side-effects of Paxil). On the other hand, the environmental movement tends to suffer from unfounded, reflexive suspicion of new technology, and has a bad habit of sensationalizing and extrapolating negative results out of proportion.

While in Geneva, I happened to have dinner with Professor Terje Traavik of the Norwegian Institute of Gene Ecology, who last year made a controversial decision to publicize findings of possible adverse health effects of GM Bt corn crops before his work had been published or reviewed by the scientific community. I don’t know whether his initial findings will be borne out or not, and it certainly may not have been the wisest course of action to publicize the findings so early on (though having spoken with him, I should at least convey my impression that his decision was sincerely motivated out of good conscience).

But I do very much agree with his contention that we’re not investing enough in risk assessment research. (more…)

According to this article, New Zealand has plans to use nematodes to spread a genetically-engineered biological control for possum overpopulation. The technology would make females infertile by prompting immunological attacks on their own eggs. A naturally-marked strain of the parasite will be released to study dispersal patterns into already-infected populations and test the feasability of this kind of containment strategy.

I already knew that California is home to the country’s first cat clinic, having driven my roommate there for her pet’s annual checkup. Today I learned that it is also home to the world’s first commercial provider of cloned cats, whose business the state has just decided not to prohibit.

I don’t see anything wrong with “vanity pets” per se, if they provide comfort to a bereaved owner, or allow allergy sufferers to own pets, but it sounds like the anti-cloning lobby has a point– as the article says, “[s]uccess comes only after many tries, leaving the guinea pigs either deformed or dead.” That’s a lot of needless pain and suffering for a comparatively trivial benefit.

On the other hand, sharing an apartment with Miranda, the most meowingest pet in the world, sometimes makes me re-think how the rules of morality are applied to non-humans, specifically as regards the proper course of action to take when one feels tempted to test the dictum about cats always landing on their feet…