Future pharming - genetic engineering of animals - includes a related article on the poor treatment of transgenic animals - Animals 2000

Animals, May-June, 1998 by Jeremy Rifkin

The 9 billion animals raised each year by America's meat and dairy industries might be the most forgotten creatures in the nation. Intensively confined, physically deformed, and genetically manipulated, the majority of farm animals feed a nation that is too uncomfortable with their plight to focus on it. In 2000 and beyond, assembly-line treatment promises to worsen, the number of animals promises to grow, and the animal-protection community will face a heightened struggle to reform the way animals are reared and raised for human consumption. Here Animals offers two stories looking at the farm-animal issue--the first focusing on tomorrow,the second on today.

On the eve of the Biotech Century, the new tools of biology are opening up opportunities for refashioning life on earth. Before us lies an uncharted new landscape whose contours are being shaped in thousands of biotechnology laboratories in universities, government agencies, and corporations around the world.

Nowhere is the new genetic science likely to have a more profound impact than on the many animal species that populate our planet. Scientists can now manipulate the genetic information that helps orchestrate the developmental processes of all life forms. Using sophisticated recombinant-DNA and cell-fusion processes, they can insert, delete, and even stitch and fuse together genetic information from unrelated species, creating hybrid forms of life that have never before existed. While the global life-science companies promise a cornucopia of new benefits, a growing number of critics worry that the creation of cloned, chimeric, and transgenic animals could mean untold suffering for our fellow travelers in the animal kingdom.

A Second Genesis

Transgenic animals--those whose genetic material includes genes from another species--are a radical departure from both evolutionary history and classical breeding practices. We have been domesticating, breeding, and hybridizing animals for more than 10 millennia. But in the long history of such practices we have been restrained by species boundaries. Although nature has, on occasion, allowed us to cross closely related species boundaries, the incursions have always been narrowly prescribed. Genetic engineering bypasses species restraints altogether. The implications are considerable and far reaching--as two examples from biotech's earlier days demonstrate.

In the 1980s, Ralph Brinster of the University of Pennsylvania's School of Veterinary Medicine inserted human growth hormone genes into mouse embryos. The mice expressed the human genes and grew. twice as fast and nearly twice as big as any other mice. These "supermice," as they were dubbed by the press, then passed the human growth hormone gene on to their offspring. A strain of mice now exists that continues to express human growth genes, generation after generation.

In a comparable feat, scientists in England fused together embryo cells from a goat and a sheep and placed the result into a surrogate animal that gave birth to a sheep-goat chimera, the first such example of the "blending" of two completely unrelated animals in human history.

These results could never have been achieved even with the most sophisticated conventional breeding techniques. In biotech labs, however, the recombinant possibilities are near limitless. This radically new form of biological manipulation changes both our concept of nature and our relationship to it. For the first time in history we become the engineers of life itself. We begin to reprogram the genetic codes of our fellow creatures to suit market objectives. We take on the task of creating a second Genesis, this time a synthetic one geared to the requisites of efficiency and productivity.

Brave New Animals

Today much of the cutting-edge research in animal husbandry is occurring in the new field of "pharming." Researchers are transforming herds and flocks into biofactories to produce pharmaceutical products, medicines, and nutrients in their milk and blood. In 1996 Genzyme Transgenics announced the birth of Grace, a transgenic goat carrying a gene that produces BR-96, an antibody being developed and tested by Bristol-Meyers Squibb to deliver conjugated anticancer drugs. Companies such as Genzyme hope to produce drugs at half the cost by using transgenic "pharm animals" as chemical factories in the coming years. The company's CEO makes the point that Genzyme's new $10 million facility that makes drugs for Gaucher's disease could be replaced in the near future with a herd of just 12 goats.

The new pharming technology moved a step closer to commercial reality on February 22, 1997, when Ian Wilmut, a 52-year-old Scottish embryologist, announced the cloning of the first mammal in history--a sheep named Dolly. Wilmut replaced the DNA in a normal sheep egg with the DNA from the mammary gland of an adult sheep. He tricked the egg into growing and inserted it into the womb of another sheep. The birth of Dolly is a milestone event of the emerging Biotech Century. It is now possible to mass-produce identical copies of a mammal, each indistinguishable from the original. Cloning brings society into the bioindustrial age by guaranteeing the kind of quantifiable standards of measurement, predictability, and efficiency that have previously been used to transform inanimate matter and energy into mass-produced material goods.