Keeping the Blood Thinners Out of Our Cereal

It's hard enough to keep 'traditional' genetically modified plants from polluting natural crops, but plants tweaked to produce chemicals or medicine -- or even human proteins -- pose an even greater challenge.

Consumers are willing to put up with unintentionally pest-resistant breakfast cereals. Infusions of insulin or blood thinners, however, would be unacceptable. Even the agriculture industry, long friendly to standard GM, is wary of such crops.

Last month, after the USDA green-lighted a rice spliced with human genes , the US Rice Association asked them to reconsider. If table-bound crops were accidentally damaged, they warned,
"the financial devastation to the U.S. rice industry would likely be absolute." It was a rather late turnaround. As Denise Caruso writes in the New York Times:

Despite science-based concerns voiced by farmers, environmentalists and even its own researchers, the United States Department of Agriculture has approved more than 100 applications to grow so-called biopharma crops of corn, soybeans, barley, rice, safflower and tobacco in the United States.

Caruso goes on to discuss the biopharming dilemma:

But there is some scientific evidence not acknowledged in biopharma risk assessments that casts a dark cloud over this silver lining.

For starters, the “system” under discussion is nature, and despite our best efforts it always manages to elude our puny attempts at controlling it.
The containment practices used by developers assume an ability to control living and propagating organisms, which scientific evidence does not support.

It's worth a read.

How to Confine the Plants of the Future? [New York Times]