Playing With Fire - Pharmed Veggies

Experiments to cultivate drug-producing lettuce is generating a lot of resistance in California. The biotechnology industry is hoping to use plants, including common crops, to produce new, high-value drugs. From ENN:

"Scientists say there is no way to keep untested drugs produced in food crops out of the food supply. Even the editors of the pro-biotechnology science journal Nature Biotechnology warned:
'Don't use food plants for producing drugs,' because of the health risks.

Consumers, including our children, who may unknowingly eat pharmed lettuce could get an uncontrolled dose of an untested, biologically active drug - with unknown consequences.

[Professor Henry Danielle, founder of "pharm crop" developer Chlorogen Inc.] claims that contamination would not be a concern because his drug-producing lettuce can't cross with natural lettuce varieties."

However, a previous experiment with drug-producing corn in the midwest by top pharm crop developer, Prodigene, wound up spreading the drug contamination into the soybean crop causing the government to order half a million bushels of Nebraska soybeans to be destroyed.

"But, ProdiGene's corn did not cross-pollinate with soybeans: It contaminated soybeans with volunteer drug-corn from the previous season's seed grown on the same land. The drug corn went undetected in the soybean field that was harvested the following season.

Cross-pollination is one of many potential routes of contamination. Other unapproved biotech crops have contaminated safe, natural varieties during every stage of production.

Contamination occurs through seed mix-ups, wind or animal seed dispersal, not thoroughly cleaned farm equipment and storage bins, improperly labeled seeds, and numerous other unpredictable ways, often from human error.

Danielle's system for avoiding cross-pollination relies on the hope that genes inserted into a plant's chloroplast cells will not be a contamination problem, since they are a part of the plant's DNA that does not mix in pollination. But, a 2003 study found that genes can move between the chloroplast and nuclei of plants, and they did so more often than researchers expected. This means that Danielle's untested drug plants could cross-pollinate with lettuce destined for our dinner tables."