Ag-Biotech: It’s Not Just What’s for Dinner Anymore, but the Future Contents of our Medicine Cabinets

Forget about farm-to-fork when it comes to genetically modified (GM) crops. Think farm-to-pharmacy, or farmto-factory. Produced through plant molecular farming (PMF), this new set of transgenic crops is being grown not for food, but to produce medicines and industrial products. For example, potatoes have been modified to produce a vaccine against the Norwalk virus, research that is currently in human clinical trials to determine efficacy (Tacket et al., 2000). On the industrial side, corn plants have been modified to produce trypsin, an enzyme used in the manufacturing process of insulin and vaccines, an application already on the market in the United States under the name TrypZeantm (www.prodigene.com). GM food production and PMF differ in one very significant way. In GM food, the product is the plant (to be consumed by humans or animals). In PMF, the product is the medical or industrial compound (the plant is not destined for the food chain). For GM food, the idea is to make crops easier to grow, for example through insect or herbicide resistance, or to enhance a crop’s nutritional value, as in vitamin A enriched “Golden Rice.” In PMF, the crop is used as a production vehicle or factory (Ma, Drake, & Christou, 2003). It is the ultimate product, the medical or industrial compound that is of interest, not the plant itself, which is considered a waste product after the compound is removed. PMF products can be grown in both food crops and nonfood crops (corn and tobacco are the most common platforms). By uniting agricultural biotechnologies with medicinal and industrial processes, PMF has already aroused controversy. Those with a stake in this technology include conventional farmers, PMF companies, food processors and exporters, academic scientists, patient groups, policymakers, as well as members of the general public. And just as the number of stakeholders is large, so is the disparity in opinion. Prodigene, an early industry player in PMF, has this outlook for the technology on its website (www.prodigene.com):