techno-utopian rice

Continuing on the rice theme for the moment...

Last Friday the Boston Globe carried a story about anti-hay fever GMO rice. "Anti-hay fever rice may win over Japanese doubts." Apparently researchers are engineering genes into rice that code for a few of cedar pollen's allergenic proteins. The idea is that people would eat the rice and sensitize their immune system to the proteins, moderating their immune response -- sort of the same reaction as the body would have to allergy shots. Apparently engineered mice that were fed the rice sneezed less often than non-engineered mice when cedar pollen was dumped on them. (I kid you not -- they really said that in the article -- scientists now evaluate the effectiveness of their inventions by counting how many times mice sneeze.)

Ok, there are lots of red flags that should go up about engineering rice that might be used as an allergy treatment, like what happens to people who aren't now allergic to cedar pollen but might have some reaction to eating pollen proteins everyday in their rice. By now it should be clear to everyone that genes don't stay put. Non-allergic people are going to end up eating the cedar pollen rice.

But more striking to me than the bonehead idea to put proteins that are known to cause allergic reactions into one of the world's most important food crops... was the overt propagandistic nature of the news reporting. This rice, if it works at all beyond the mouse cage, is a decade or more away from reality. The organization that was promoting the story is named ISAAA -- International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications. It's a non-profit organization that gets the bulk of its funding from the genetic engineering industry. They spend much of their time feeding "biotech will save the world" propaganda pieces to media outlets around the world.

This piece, more than most, reeked of gee-whiz techno-utopian gobbledygook. One wishes science and business reporters and editors would look at these stories just a little more critically. The rice industry is reeling from contamination event after contamination event, as genetic engineering firms can't keep track of their genes. The grocery industry is adamantly opposed to the use of food crops for production of human drugs, including cedar pollen rice, and reasonably so. Why waste newspaper space to carry yet another cheap propaganda piece developed by the industry to try to convince dubious consumers that someday, sometime in the future, they might see some benefit from eating genetically engineered foods?