Biohazards: The Next Generation?

• Author: Tokar, Brian

Engineering Plants to Manufacture Pharmaceuticals and Industrial Enzymes

With the worldwide rejection of genetically engineered foods, the biotechnology industry is scrambling to develop a new generation of products that can might someday be seen as advantageous for consumers and beneficial to humanity. This is the primary motivation, of course, behind the massive PR campaign to sell the benefits of so-called "golden" vitamin-A rice. Even as the claimed health benefits of this invention have been widely discredited--and activists in the global South have been in the forefront of pointing out that such inventions will do nothing to help people reclaim the ability to feed themselves--the mainstream press continues to tour this rice as evidence that biotechnology will someday feed the world. This is only the beginning.

The widely-touted "next-generation" of genetically engineered products are quite diverse in nature. They include salmon that can reportedly grow up to twice as fast as non-engineered varieties, with serious consequences for native ecosystems once these "super-fish" escape from coastal fish farms. Poplar, eucalyptus and pine trees are being genetically engineered to grow faster and more uniformly, tolerate high doses of herbicides, and become more suitable for chemical processing into paper pulp. Here, the potential ecological consequences are magnified many-fold compared to the already well-known hazards of GE varieties of annual food crops, due to trees' longer lifespan, the more persistent spread of their pollen, and effects on countless other forest-dependent species. Researchers are even claiming to be ready to release genetically engineered insects on an experimental basis. Whether they are engineered to administer vaccines, or weakened strains intended to compete against pathological insects and crop p ests, it is extremely unlikely that such creatures could ever be satisfactorily controlled. The potential problems are reminiscent of the genetically engineered Australian mice that were hoped to facilitate population control due to reduced reproductive ability, but instead annihilated an entire population.

Another relatively recent development is the engineering of plants to produce a variety of pharmaceuticals and industrial chemicals. Nearly everyone has read of efforts to engineer bananas that might someday be used to administer vaccines; as with countless other applications of genetic engineering, the hype is far more...