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FROM DAILY MAIL

The rice with human genes
By SEAN POULTER
Last updated at 08:57 06 March 2007

The first GM food crop containing human genes is set to be approved for commercial production.

The laboratory-created rice produces some of the human proteins found in breast milk and saliva.

Its U.S. developers say they could be used to treat children with diarrhoea, a major killer in the Third World.

The rice is a major step in so-called Frankenstein Foods, the first mingling of human-origin genes and those from plants. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture has already signalled it plans to allow commercial cultivation.

The rice's producers, California-based Ventria Bioscience, have been given preliminary approval to grow it on more than 3,000 acres in Kansas. The company plans to harvest the proteins and use them in drinks, desserts, yoghurts and muesli bars.
The news provoked horror among GM critics and consumer groups on both sides of the Atlantic.

GeneWatch UK, which monitors new GM foods, described it as "very disturbing". Researcher Becky Price warned: "There are huge, huge health risks and people should rightly be concerned about this."

Friends of the Earth campaigner Clare Oxborrow said: "Using food crops and fields as glorified drug factories is a very worrying development.

"If these pharmaceutical crops end up on consumers' plates, the consequences for our health could be devastating.
"The biotech industry has already failed to prevent experimental GM rice contaminating the food chain.

"The Government must urge the U.S. to ban the production of drugs in food crops. It must also introduce tough measures to prevent illegal GM crops contaminating our food and ensure that biotech companies are liable for any damage their products cause."

In the U.S., the Union of Concerned Scientists, a policy advocacy group, warned: "It is unwise to produce drugs in plants outdoors.


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From Physorg
Welsh scientists 'clone' human virus
September 13, 2010


A team of Welsh scientists have successfully cloned a human virus offering new hope for the treatment of potentially life-threatening diseases.
Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) is a major infectious cause of congenital malformations worldwide. The virus is also known to cause life-threatening disease in transplant patients and people with HIV/AIDS.

The development of new treatments has been hampered as scientists have been unable to stably replicate HCMV outside the human body.

Dr Richard Stanton from Cardiff University's School of Medicine who led the joint research, said: "HCMV has by far the largest genome of all viruses affecting humans - consequently it was technically difficult to clone in an intact form in the laboratory.

"Cloning a copy of the virus from a strain isolated by Cardiff Public Health Laboratories has enabled us to identify the genes causing the instability of the virus outside the body.

"Following the identification of these genes, we have successfully developed cells in which we can grow virus that corresponds to that which exists in the human body."

Cloning the virus for the first time will help virologists develop antivirals and vaccines against the virus that causes clinical disease.

Following the study, the clone has already been distributed to research laboratories worldwide, and is being tested by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as part of a study to develop an international diagnostic standard with which to compare clinical isolates.

The genome sequence of the Cardiff virus has also been designated the international reference for HCMV in the National Centre for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) - an international database that provides reference standards for biomedical and genomic information.

Dr Stanton added: "HCMV has been designated as a highest priority vaccine target by the US Institute of Medicine. When developing vaccines, anti-viral agents and improving understanding of disease, it is crucial to work with a virus that accurately represents the virus present in patients.

"For the first time our work has enabled us to create an exact copy of the virus outside of the body offering a vital step forward in the development of new treatments."

The study, published in the The Journal of Clinical Investigationand funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Medical Research Council, was a joint collaboration between Cardiff University's Infection, Immunity and Inflammation Interdisciplinary Research Group and Drs Davison and Dargan at the Centre for Virus Research at the University of Glasgow.

The virus, named Merlin, was isolated from a clinical sample identified by the Diagnostic Unit, Public Health Wales.



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"Thomas Pawlick's new book is full of very scary facts on how modern industrial farming techniques have reduced the available nutrients. For instance, since 1950 supermarket potatoes in Canada no longer contain Vitamin A, their iron quotient has been reduced by 57% along with their Vitamin C. Meanwhile, tomatoes have lost 61.5% of their calcium, 35.5% of their iron and 50% of their Vitamin A while gaining 200% more sodium! The End of Food shows how it's not enough simply to eat a salad, consumers need to think carefully about who grew the ingredients in it and how and where. And that's not even getting into what's put into our livestock. Gremolata's Malcolm Jolley caught up with the author recently in Toronto."

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