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Consider Jacki Harris, who through no fault of her own makes 25% less than she did a few years ago. With overtime, Harris, 41, was making $59,000 a year for delivering airplane parts and keeping track of blueprints at a Boeing jet plant in Long Beach, Calif. She was relieved to keep her job through several rounds of layoffs. But as the ranks thinned, she lost her seniority edge and ended up as a clerk making $44,000 a year with no possibility of overtime. "I cried for a month," says Harris, a single parent with a 13-year...
...that's just for starters. Epicyte is one of a host of biotech companies that have seized on the information in the map of the human genome--a map that was officially declared complete last month--to create all manner of plant-based pharmaceuticals. Researchers have launched more than 300 trials of genetically engineered crops to produce everything from fruit-based hepatitis vaccines to AIDS drugs grown in tobacco leaves. They call this biopharming...
Critics--and there are many--have another name for it. They call it Pharmageddon. Environmentalists are worried that the unnaturally combined genes, when loosed upon the ecosphere, will spread like genetic kudzu. Consumer advocates, who have never warmed to today's genetically modified foods, fear that plant-grown drugs and industrial chemicals will end up on their dinner tables. Hoping to head off a public revolt, the Federal Government is putting the finishing touches on new regulations aimed at reassuring the grocery industry that human-based crops will not contaminate the food supply...
...begun for experimental crop-grown drugs to treat cystic fibrosis, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and hepatitis B. "Molecular farming represents the pharmaceutical industry's best opportunity to strike a serious blow against such global diseases as AIDS, Alzheimer's and cancer," says Francois Arcand, president of the Conference on Plant-Made Pharmaceuticals, held in Quebec City earlier this year...
Achieving the same results through biopharming--splicing antibodies into the genetic fabric of plants, growing them in fields and extracting and purifying them--could cut costs by half. "If you don't have to spend half a billion, then more products can advance to the marketplace," says Arizona State University researcher Charles Arntzen. The opportunities, he points out, are not limited to human drugs. Arntzen foresees rich markets for plant-grown vaccines to protect fish and poultry against diseases now being treated--and in many cases overtreated--with conventional antibiotics...