User talk:Neil/DNAP
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Have to be careful to not make this a coatrack for the tobacco business or anti-GM in general; however DNAPT is an ongoing business and is involved in a lot of GM food research.
[edit] Wash times
(use for reference only, copyio to keep permanently--and an op-ed, not a new article)
The Washington Times
August 21, 2000, Monday, Final Edition
Genetically engineered food fight
SECTION: PART A; COMMENTARY; EDITORIALS; LETTERS; Pg. A16
LENGTH: 279 words
Michael J. Phillips of the Biotechnology Industry Association risks distorting the facts on genetically engineered foods in his Aug. 9 letter ("Biotechnology firm gives article the raspberry"). While he is right when he corrects an assertion in an Aug. 3 article ("Cucumber-melon fights disease, needs new name") about the flounder-tomato not being on the market, he is wrong when he calls it "mythical."
The DNA Plant Technology Corp. was issued Agriculture Department permit No. 91-079-01R on June 18, 1991, for a field-test tomato it genetically engineered with an "antifreeze gene" replicated from a winter flounder.
Mr. Phillips asserts that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would label such a frankenfood, but it is actually unclear that it would. FDA has not required labeling of genetically engineered corn, soy, canola or potatoes - all of which are on the market today. The agency claims genetically engineered foods are "substantially equivalent" to conventional foods, even though the companies that make them acquire patents to prove that they are unique.
Friends of the Earth believes that we all deserve the right to know what is in our food, whether it is artificial sweeteners, colors, flavors or produce made with fish genes. Because the FDA does not require labeling or independent safety analysis of genetically engineered foods for the public benefit, we have joined 50 other groups in petitioning the agency to require the same kind of labeling as for other food additives, as well as thorough health and environmental safety testing.
[edit] Flounder tomato
National Post (Canada)
December 5, 2002 Thursday National Edition
Bovine romaine with Ranch dressing
SOURCE: Featurewell
BYLINE: Ronald Bailey
SECTION: Editorials; Pg. A25
LENGTH: 796 words
'We oppose the introduction of animal genes into plant foods," declares a pledge adopted at the 33rd World Vegetarian Congress. "When animal genes are inserted in bio-engineered foods, these plant foods are no longer truly vegetarian," argues an article in the Vegetarian Advocate.
It is easy to see how committed vegetarians, concerned as they are with animal welfare, might be worried about the effects of genetic engineering on the health and well-being of animals. But it is far from clear why vegetarians would object to inserting animal genes into plants. Ethical vegetarians want to prevent animal suffering. But genes have no feelings, no capacity to suffer, no desires of any kind. Genes are just sequences of the chemical bases adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine that provide recipes for combining amino acids to produce various proteins. Worrying about eating animal genes is akin to worrying about the ethical implications of eating a page out of a steak cookbook.
Consider the case of the "flounder tomato," often cited by vegetarian worrywarts. Flounder produce a kind of natural antifreeze that allows them to thrive in Arctic waters. In the early 1990s, the biotech company DNA Plant Technology inserted the gene responsible for this ability into tomato plants. The idea was to produce a tomato that could be frozen and thawed without becoming mushy. Unfortunately, the experiment didn't pan out. Consequently, despite the impression left by various activist Web sites, 11 years later no such tomatoes are being sold anywhere.
But what if the flounder tomato had been a success? Would eating one make the consumer a carnivore? Hardly. A report from the New Zealand government's Institute of Crop and Food Research calculates that the one million or so plant cells in a mouthful of a fruit or vegetable to which an animal gene had been added would contain less animal DNA than a single human cell. Vegetarians (although not strict vegans, who eschew all animal products, including milk and eggs) already have a precedent to guide them on the issue of animal genes in food. Until 1990, the vast majority of cheese was produced using a curdling agent called rennet, the sole source of which was the linings of the fourth stomachs of slaughtered calves. Twelve years ago, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a biotech version called chymosin, which is produced by yeast and bacteria into which the calf gene for the enzyme has been spliced. Now nearly 80% of all hard cheeses made in the United States are produced with the biotech enzyme. Many vegetarian groups have embraced cheeses made with chymosin as "vegetarian cheese." They recognize that an animal gene spliced into a fungus is saving millions of calves from being slaughtered for their rennet. Surely this is an animal-friendly result. Incidentally, another advantage is that biotech chymosin makes cheeses kosher and halal. Observant Jews and Muslims no longer have to worry whether the enzyme used for curdling comes from calves slaughtered according to religious requirements.
If some vegetarians are concerned about animal genes in plants, perhaps we should all be worried about cannibalism. After all, researchers have spliced human genes into plants and animals. Again, so what? These human genes are not to be confused with actual human beings; they are recipes for useful proteins that might be used as medicines, not fingers or toes that might serve as macabre hors d'oeuvres.
Besides, people eat human genes all the time. Breast-fed babies, for example, typically consume more than 200,000 human cells from their mothers per millilitre of milk. And as the New Zealand report notes, "the simple act of a passionate kiss or oral sex may result in the consumption of considerably more animal DNA, from another individual, than [would] eating a mouthful of a transgenic plant containing an animal gene."
In any case, as Canada's National Institute of Nutrition points out, "There really is no such thing as an 'animal gene' or a 'plant gene.' In fact, humans have many genes in common with other animals, plants and even bacteria." Mexican plant geneticist Luis Herrera-Estrella likewise notes that "about 60% of the plant genes have very similar copies in animals." This is not surprising, since all living things share the same genetic toolbox.
Not all vegetarians are confused on this issue. Microbiologist Emanuel Goldman of the New Jersey Medical School, for example, tried to persuade the World Vegetarian Congress that animal genes inserted into bacteria, yeast or plants offer "the most realistic opportunity yet" to free humanity from having to kill or exploit animals. Thoughtful vegetarians should resist being co-opted by the anti-biotech movement.
[edit] RNA interference
Looks like DNAPT was one of the discoverers of RNA interference, see PMID 12354959 and the author's affiliations; this is referenced at RNA interference but the name of the company is not, that would be a good inward link. This is a major big thing in biotech!
Newsweek
June 10, 2005 U.S. Edition
Silencing Bad Genes; Scientists are trying to harness a form of RNA that interferes with the disease process. The purple-petunia payoff.?
BYLINE: By Anthony Komaroff, M.D., and Judy Lieberman, M.D., Ph.D.; Komaroff and Lieberman are professors at Harvard Medical School. For health information for the public from Harvard Medical School, go to health.harvard.edu.
SECTION: SPECIAL EDITION: THE FUTURE OF MEDICINE: YOUR HEALTH IN THE 21ST CENTURY: SUMMER 2005; The Future Of Medicine; Pg. 51
LENGTH: 1087 words
A 6-year-old boy is suddenly engulfed by pain. It is his first attack; he will suffer repeated agony, along with breathlessness and debilitating fatigue, for the rest of his short life. Over the course of a few days, a 35-year-old lawyer loses her appetite and energy, then the whites of her eyes turn yellow. Trying to open a stuck window, a 55-year-old nurse feels a sudden sharp pain just above her wrist. The bone has broken, weakened by cancer cells that have silently spread there from her breast, and are multiplying uncontrollably.
In each case, wayward genes are the culprit. The boy inherited a defective gene that makes a misshapen version of the hemoglobin protein inside his red blood cells, causing sickle cell anemia. The lawyer has been infected by a hepatitis virus that has commandeered her liver cells, instructing them to make proteins from viral genes instead of from human genes. The nurse inherited a breast-cancer gene from her Ashkenazi Jewish parents, and the gene is ordering the cells to multiply.
Doctors have long dreamed of a magic bullet that could travel harmlessly through the body to diseased cells, enter those cells and switch off the wayward genes that cause the suffering. Now, new research holds out hope for just such a treatment, through a technique called RNA interference. Since the 1960s it has been the central tenet of biology that a specific sequence of DNA (a gene) makes a specific sequence of messenger RNA, which in turn makes a specific protein. This profoundly important insight led to an important question, however. What controls that process? All our genes are contained in each of our cells. But in each cell, certain genes are expressed while others remain dormant, which is why the trillions of cells in the human body look and function differently from one another.
Over the past 30 years, scientists have identified various proteins that activate or silence genes. However, those proteins are large and complex molecules that are difficult to harness in order to control disease. The surprise breakthrough came in 1990. A team of plant scientists at the University of California, Davis, and a company called DNA Plant Technology were trying to make a purple petunia even more purple by inserting into it a gene for purple pigment. Instead of turning a deeper purple, however, some of the flowers were pale white and others were mottled. The researchers discovered that the inserted gene had stimulated the production of very small RNAs, and that these microRNAs shut down the gene activity that led to the production of purple pigment. Other scientists then found microRNAs in primitive animals and in humans. The microRNA attaches to the messenger RNA and destroys it before it can produce its designated protein, thus "interfering with" or "silencing" the instructions of the gene.
Considered just a curiosity at first, RNA interference has since revolution-ized biological research. It allows scientists to silence specific genes very precisely in cell cultures and even in animals, like mice. Since science has now identified every gene in humans, in several animals and in many microorganisms that cause human disease, researchers can systematically silence one gene after another, and observe what happens to the cells or the animals--a direct test of a gene's function, including its role in causing a particular disease. If a gene plays such a role, it becomes a target for developing a conventional or novel drug treatment.
Could microRNA technology lead to the magic bullet--drugs that silence wayward genes? It's easy enough to produce microRNAs that silence a particular gene. Such synthetically made RNAs are called small interfering RNAs, or siRNAs. The hard part is delivering the siRNA to the cells deep inside the body, where the wayward genes are causing mayhem. But progress is being made. Scientists are figuring out ways to protect the siRNAs from destruction as they circulate through the body, and to allow them entry into the target cells. In animal studies, siRNAs have stifled autoimmune hepatitis, a neurological disease called spinocerebellar ataxia, several viral diseases and several types of cancer, and have dramatically lowered cholesterol levels. And, in human studies, siRNAs have recently shown promise in the treatment of macular degeneration, the leading cause of blindness in the elderly.
It's true that we already have conventional drugs that inhibit the reproduction of some viruses, slow the growth of cancer and lower cholesterol. But RNA-interference technology offers a number of advantages. For one thing, there are many pathological genes for which no counteracting drugs have yet been developed. And while the process of looking for conventional drugs that counteract the effects of wayward genes is getting faster and more efficient, it's still ponderous and expensive. Once scientists know the identity and structure of a wayward gene, they can easily make siRNAs to silence it. And, compared with most conventional drugs, siRNAs are simple molecules that should be very inexpensive to produce. Also, since the immune system does not recognize siRNAs as foreign, they would likely produce fewer side effects than conventional drugs.
Though there are reasons to be optimistic that this new technology will lead to powerful and nontoxic new treatments, there are many obstacles to overcome. It remains to be seen whether siRNAs will be able to reach all their potential targets deep in the body. And there is the possibility of collateral damage; some siRNAs may silence not only a wayward gene but several healthy genes with similar structures as well. It is also uncertain how durable the effect of this new form of therapy will be. It's possible that in chronic diseases, siRNAs, like conventional treatments, will need to be given repeatedly in order to sustain a beneficial effect. Eventually, gene therapy may be used to express microRNAs throughout a patient's life, but gene therapy has been plagued by difficulties.
While the value of RNA-interference therapy in humans remains to be proved, the story of its discovery is just the latest example of how an investment in basic research can lead to completely unexpected, and enormously beneficial, results. Who could have imagined that trying to make a petunia more purple would reveal a potential new approach for shutting down the growth of cancer? No one. That's why it's wise for a society to invest in curious people who try to understand how living things work.
