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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Genetically modified crops that produce drugs are the latest rage. But American farmers are lighting a prairie fire of revolt.
Aug 19, 2003 | On the bluffs overlooking the Huerfano River of eastern Colorado, farmer Doug Wiley raises cattle and pigs and grows "a little dab" of melons and sweet corn. He's an organic farmer, but he hasn't bothered with official certification: "I'm what you call country certified," he says. "That means I shake your hand, look you in the eye, and invite you to come out to my place and see what I'm doing."
Wiley knows exactly what he's doing; his farm has been in his family for almost 90 years, and he's worked the same patch of dirt his entire life. He's beginning to wonder, though, if he's always going to be so rock-solid sure about what's sprouting on the land around him.
Earlier this year, Wiley learned that Meristem Therapeutics, a biotechnology company based in France, wants to test a new sort of genetically modified corn in Colorado soil. The company's crop produces proteins that can be used to manufacture lipase, an enzyme used in the treatment of digestive disorders. Optimistic backers say this corn and other "pharmaceutical" crops could one day provide cheaper, more accessible treatments for maladies ranging from the life threatening to the merely annoying. They say pharmaceutical crops might also open lucrative markets to the nation's struggling small farmers.
But to Wiley and many other Colorado farmers, Meristem represents not an opportunity but a mortal threat. Their anxieties about pharmaceutical plants might sound, at first, like an echo of the familiar debate around genetically modified foods: Wandering pollen could introduce genes into food crops or wild plants, which might then produce novel proteins; pharmaceutical plants could be accidentally mixed with food shipments; and climate changes or other environmental factors might cause inserted genes to express themselves in unexpected and unwelcome ways.
You've heard it all before, right? So has Wiley; genetically engineered food crops like pesticide-resistant corn have been grown in Colorado since the early 1990s. But even though pharmaceutical plants are borne from the same technology as their vitamin-enriched or frost-tolerant cousins, their job is quite different, often blurring the line between food and pharmacy.
Pharmaceutical plants might take the familiar forms of corn or lettuce or tomatoes, but they're not meant to be eaten; they're designed to be efficient living factories for pharmaceuticals and other therapeutic products. It's not known how stray proteins from these crops could affect human health, but anyone can predict their impact on human consumer habits. Even if there's only a small chance of contraceptives in your cornflakes, you're not likely to be buying.
None of this is welcome news to Wiley. If "biopharmed" plants were to cross with food plants in his neighborhood, or find their way into a nearby silo, visitors to his country-certified farm might start asking him questions he couldn't quite answer. He's not willing to watch this happen -- "I'd fight tooth and nail to keep farming here," he says -- so he and other skeptics have organized a remarkably dedicated opposition. Their persistent questions, complaints and criticism, directed at Meristem and at state and federal regulators, are making Colorado an uncomfortable place for the would-be biopharmer.
