Vaccines & other pharmaceuticals in lettuce? They keep trying.
The biggest problems are dosage, cross contamination, and making it work.
Do you find this tweet horrifying? The person who sent it to me thought it was monstrous. The person who wrote it is ready to overthrow his government.
It isn’t new. Attempts have been made to genetically engineer pharmaceuticals into food plants for decades. Here are some near-disasters, tracked by GM Watch.
This text was snipped from a 2021 GM Watch article on someone’s idea of turning lettuce and spinach into mRNA vaccine factories.
There have been disasters, many failures, and no successes to date, but researchers continue to be given squillions of dollars to fail. I don’t know why.
We’re all familiar with the idea of Pfizer, Moderna and Astrazeneca transfecting our cells with their synthetic mRNA or circular DNA to use our cells to make their spike proteins, yes? That’s the major GMO game - getting a plant or this case a person to make the protein you want it to make.
Most commercial GM crops either make a bacterial protein to help the crop survive being sprayed with the company herbicide and/or make a bacterial insecticidal protein to kill chewing insects. It isn’t clear how well these inventions work (plants are put under various new stresses), but that’s the game. As such it’s not a big leap to engineer a plant to produce a protein for pharmaceutical purposes. But the idea is crazy.
Dosage is an issue. How much spike protein or mRNA do you want to eat? Depends how much lettuce you want to eat, and how much the various lettuce leaves were producing at the time.
Cross-contamination is an issue. One doesn’t want to accidentally eat too much pharmaceutical proteins from lettuces that weren’t meant to be producing them.
Getting it to work is an issue. It’s not an easy game to get a species to make a protein from a completely different life form. Monsanto couldn’t get their corn to fold the GMO bacterial insecticidal proteins correctly, but they didn’t mind because the proteins were far more toxic if they weren’t folded, and better if they were broken/truncated. It wasn’t so hard with the covid vaccines, because our cells were the target for the both the virus and the corporate vaccines (albeit I never saw a study that checked for correct conformation). But getting a plant to correctly produce a viral protein - that’s going to be more challenging.
I hope these inventors can continue to fail. Nothing good can come of it. And sadly, if we wanted to eat pharmaceuticals in our food we could take the easy route of growing it in reclaimed water and contaminated soils. Many examples. I want our water to be clean, and people to be healthy.