Life on the research farm

By STEPHEN STRAUSS
Globe and Mail Thursday, Feb. 26, 2004

Let me fill you this week with images of endlessly ejaculating pigs, endlessly omnivorous chickens and the endlessly bumpy future of GM agriculture.

Virtually buried by other news stories last week was the account of Three Genetically Modified Big Pigs who accidentally had been turned into chicken feed. The pigs were part of several strains of animals on a Quebec research farm to which genes have been added in the hopes of creating what you might call pharmaceuticalized sperm.

More specifically, one of the pigs carried the genes that produces human follicle- stimulating hormone and another carried a gene for pig follicle-stimulating hormone. These are substances which are given to women and animals to induce them to super-ovulate - that is release a lot of eggs to be used in in vitro fertilization.

The third pig carried the gene for EPO, the growth hormone which of late has become notorious for its use by athletes in what is known as "blood doping."

The idea is to "harvest" these chemicals from pig's sperm. How much of much sperm can there be, you might wonder? Jean-Francois Huc, recently installed president of TGN Biotech which created the pigs, says you can gather anywhere from 250 to 750 millilitres of sperm several times a week. The harvesting mechanisms are stainless steel, pig-shaped dummies which boars mount and ejaculate into.

"I don't think you can hit me with any jokes about this I haven't heard," Mr. Huc told me with a little sigh about the "boarish" milking technology.

TGN thinks the fact that you can produce a lot of pigs quickly — roughly 30 piglets per sow per year — means that it is more efficient to breed porcine bioreactors than use other animals as your living drug-making laboratory. It's also true that if the expression of the drug is only in sperm and that is good because the seminal gland is very isolated — more than that of the milk-producing mammary gland — from other parts of the body.

However good or icky you might find the process, there are also regulations in place which say that never, ever should animals so altered get into the food supply of either animals or humans. But, the week before last they did. Three roughly 200 kilogram sows were accidentally put in the bin of animals to be sent to the rendering plant by a tractor operator. A technician who was supposed to double-check what bodies went where then also goofed.

At the renderers the pigs were boiled down and turned into some of the fat and protein raw material of chicken food. Two days later TGN discovered its error and immediately notified the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, which quickly initiated a recall operation. And that produced an interesting first truth. In two days what had been 600 kilograms of pig had been mixed into 7 tonnes of chickenfeed by four mills. By the time that the mistake had been discovered some of the feed had already made it to farms and maybe made it down some chickens' gullets.

That is to say, when something enters the food supply it gets spread far and wide very quickly.

Secondly, there are two ways of looking at the incident. One is that the system which tries to keep genetically modified pig bioreactors out of the food supply is very good at reacting to an emergency and fixing the problem. The other is that these are very early days in the creation of an animal-based biotechnology industry. This is the second time in two years that pigs have accidentally entered the animal feed food chain.

We don't want this to happen. Not I daresay because these particular animals — who after all weren't boars and weren't expressing any of the pharmaceuticals in their bodies — necessarily posed a health threat to chickens who are renowned for eating everything. Rather, in what looks increasingly like a future in which there will be food agriculture and non-food agriculture, for general peace of mind we have to make sure that we absolutely separate the two end points of dead animal.

Which brings me to a third realization. What, you may wonder, would ordinarily have happened to TGN's Three Big Pigs? "Incineration," says Mr. Huc tartly. That for sure gets rid of the animals, but it also destroys what has been up to now a gruesome, but virtuous, cycle of animal use. If we are interested in respecting the spirit of recycling, it is better to turn animals into other things we use rather than so much smoke and ash. That is, in general, rendering is a good thing.

If the long-term answer is to make something good out of the corpses of GM animals, the Toronto-based Biox Corporation may soon present an interesting option. Using a process developed at the University of Toronto, later this year the company will start producing biodiesel fuel from, among other things, rendered animal fats. Biodiesel is a relatively non-polluting fuel and thus would seem a worthwhile place to let all the Three Big GM Pigs of the future come to their ecological rest.

What is fuel for our vehicles, may turn into mental health food for our GM worried souls.