The future

A typical human cell is the size of about 10 square micrometers which means that hundreds of today’s smallest transistors could fit inside a single cell. If the rate of miniaturization continues, by 2020 about 2,500 transistors – equivalent to microprocessors of the first generation of personal computers – will fit into a living cell.

Reference

Instituto de Microelectrónica de Barcelona

published in Small,

Vol 6, (4) pp 499-502

Reference

Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences

Center for Biosciences and Department of Biosciences and Nutrition, Sweden.

Hugo J. Snippert, et al. Science 12 March 2010: 1385-1389.

See following links for story

SBS News

PhysOrg

The research appeared in Nature Biotechnology – 15 March 2010

The team from the Sainsbury Laboratory, UK, is already extending its work to several crop plants, including potato, apple, cassava and banana — all of which suffer from damaging bacterial diseases, particularly in the developing world.

This is a broad spectrum disease-resistance that will be difficult from pathogens to develop resistance to, but it is still a transgenic technique. The crop is considered a GMO.

What is natural?

From experience, people have less concern about a GM crop if the foreign gene is from a plant.  They still have concerns, but for a variety of reasons (scientific, social, ethical) the risks become more acceptable.  For the most part, the acceptability aspect appears to be driven by degrees of ‘naturalness’.  That is, a foreign gene from a plant is more natural than one from a bacterium, which is more natural or has a higher degree of acceptability than a gene from an animal going into a plant.

Rational or not, the concept of unnaturalness is always one of the key points of discussion in chats with members of the public about GM crops.

Any GM crop using the above technology will most likely be a number of years away from commercialization, assuming it makes it through all the technical and regulatory hoops. And no technology is going to be the sole answer to an agronomic or agricultural problem and this is not really disputed among any scientist working in the plant breeding field.  It will always be one tool among many to help solve a particular problem for a particular region, or regions.

Is it acceptable?

This technology is no different, but I am curious to know, if it lives up to its promise, whether it will be acceptable or not?

Under what circumstances would such a technology become acceptable, if ever?

Jason

TechNyou

One of his opening paragraphs:

“Something that belongs to the entire human race is being quietly filched from beneath our noses with the aim of selling it back to us at much inflated prices at some future point. It’s the biggest real estate scam in history.”

Gene theft?

What is being filched, according to Julian, are our genes and those of anything else that is living on this planet.  There be gold in them thar organisms, and the gold is in the form of a patent.

Julian has two key concerns.  The first that it defies basic human morality that we allow people to wander the planet patenting things that occur in nature claiming they are ‘inventions’ because they been removed from their natural environments. The second is that the majority of the gene prospecting and patenting is being done by a handful of wealthy corporates, mainly in the US and Europe.

I tend to agree with Julian Cribb on this.  I am unable to fathom how a gene that is produced by nature can be patented. Even, as the case is in Australia, that the gene first has to be isolated and reproduced and have a function ascribed to it to be patentable.  See previous TechNyou blog

But as I mention in that blog, it is a complicated issue that seems to me to be bogged down in legal semantics.  It is this discrepancy over legal terminology that is allowing companies and research institutions to exploit this patenting of life. So, in effect they are doing what we are allowing them to according to the law – if you interpret the law they way they do anyway

Public opinion

It is certainly a key issue when people talk about GM crops.  For many the debate has moved beyond whether the crops will kill me, though it still gets attention.  Nearly all people I speak to, including all seven women at a rural women’s forum we held in Shepparton, Victoria, two days ago, now raise the issue of corporate ownership of the technology or genes that are then used to create our food.

There is an Australian Government Senate committee looking into this issue of gene patents and should be due to report on it soon.

Not the last word…

If nothing else, Julian’s unwillingness to pull punches make it an interesting read and  I can guarantee this won’t be his last word on the issue.

Jason

TechNyou

10 March 2010

Reference

Research conducted by a collaborative team involving University of California, San Diego who headed the study, and scientists at The Scripps Research Institute, San Diego biofuel company Sapphire Energy and ProtElix, a protein engineering company in Hayward, CA.  The research was published online this week in Plant Biotechnology Journal.

TechNyou note

People often question why researchers genetically modify plants to produde human therapeutic proteins – once they actually become aware that this can occur. It is something they find scary, or cautiously unacceptable.  This media release adds context to the debate for this type of research.  See following quote from media release:

“Currently, human therapeutic proteins are primarily produced from either bacteria or mammalian cell culture.  Complex mammalian proteins and monoclonal antibodies are primarily produced by the culture of transgeneic mammalian cells, while simpler proteins are generally produced by E. coli.

“Due to high capital and media costs, and the inherent complexity of mammalian cell culture, proteins produced by mammalian cell culture are very expensive. Bacterial production is generally more economical in terms of media components, but bacteria are often inefficient at producing properly folded complex proteins, requiring a denaturation and renaturation step that adds significant costs to bacterial protein production.”

Reference

Research is by scientists at the BBSRC Sustainable Bioenergy Centre at the Universities of York and Portsmouth, UK and is published in  the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (PNAS)

“We emulated photosynthesis for large-scale storage of solar energy,” says MIT chemist, Dan Nocera

Reference

Research was published in Ecotoxicology March 2010