Posts Tagged ‘biotech’
Government Says Biotech Companies Can Be Their Own Safety Testers
Letting the fox guard the henhouse?
The U.S. Department of Agriculture will let the firms do the research themselves and submit data to the government, or outsource the research it to third parties and subsidize the cost.
Environmental laws require the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service to conduct reviews before biotech crops are deregulated and approved for sale to farmers. APHIS conducts environmental assessments and environmental impact studies, which are two different things, under the nuances of law. Last year a federal judge ruled the use of EA versus EIS was a violation of the National Environmental Policy Act.
Under a two-year pilot program, biotech firms will submit an environmental report, which APHIS would use to conduct its own environmental assessment or EIS. Or, the companies and the USDA will chip in to pay for a private contractor to do the research and the EIS. APHIS will still be in charge of determining whether the crop is safe, according to David Reinhold, the agency's assistant director for environmental risk analysis programs, in an interview with the ag journal .
Companies would have to submit information that would be relevant to conducting an EIS, such as “a description of the geographic area that will be affected and potential impacts on the environment, such as effects on water quality and sensitive wildlife species,” APHIS says .
The goal is to study whether this self-policing approach improves the “quality, timeliness, and cost effectiveness” of the studies, according to APHIS.
This decision stems at least in part from a series of legal decisions dating back several years. Here’s a bit of background: In 2005, Monsanto started selling sugar beets that had been genetically modified to tolerate the weed killer Roundup. Three years later, environmental groups and the Center for Food Safety sued, alleging the USDA did not follow proper procedures in deregulating the crop. In 2010, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White , saying the deregulation violated the law. His ruling also banned the future planting of any GM sugar beets until an EIS was done. But the USDA still allowed some to be planted, prompting White to last fall. Ultimately, the beets were allowed to stay in the ground, however.
Part of the problem in all this is that it takes APHIS a long time and a lot of money to complete an environmental impact study. A draft environmental assessment can cost from $60,000 to $80,000, and a full EIS can exceed $1 million, the agency says. Letting companies do it themselves would lower the government’s costs, and conceivably speed up the process. Which makes sense, because why wouldn’t biotech companies act as quickly and efficiently as possible to complete paperwork and get their crops approved?
Critics of transgenic foods say this is ridiculous. In Capital Press, Bill Freese, science policy analyst for the Center for Food Safety, said “It's like asking BP to write an assessment of an offshore drilling operation.”
Or having the Food and Drug Administration let drug companies test the safety and efficacy of new drugs, one commenter points out.
APHIS doesn’t spell out many details in its announcement, posted in the April 7 Federal Register. But at a glance, it certainly seems like a case of the fox guarding the henhouse.
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Taking Cues From Medical Tech, Big Oil Could Use Nanoparticles to Hunt for Leftover Crude in Spent Wells
In some ideological camps, there is nothing worse than drilling for oil. But while opinions on that issue are mixed, most would likely agree that drilling into the Earth only to leave behind up to half the oil that resides down there is extremely wasteful. Yet that's often what happens when the free-flowing oil from a well is depleted; oil clinging to sediments in rock formations or stuck within porous rock structures apart from the primary reservoir goes unused because it's terribly difficult to locate and extract.
In medical science, researchers have turned to nanotech to track down elusive elements within the body and to deliver drugs to highly specific areas. Now, the oil industry is doing the same, hoping to use nanoparticles to locate and extract oil deep within exhausted wells.
One method under development at Rice University in Houston involves coating nanoparticles with hydrocarbon-philic compounds that also react with the oil. By scattering nanoparticles in water that is pumped into dying wells, engineers could then examine the particles left in the water that comes back up to determine if there are still large pockets of oil hiding in porous rock below. Another method under development at Penn State exploits the saline gradient between the fresh water pumped into wells with the briny water naturally occurring within them, using the difference in salinity to propel the particles forward into the formation where a coating on the particles make it actively seek out oil hiding in the rock.
But while these methods would help engineers figure out if there is remaining oil underfoot, it won't help them get at it. For that, researchers at the University of Kansas are working on an idea very similar to the nanocapsule drug delivery systems used in medicine. Such methods coat a drug-filled nanocapsule with a coating that only lets it release its pharmaceutical payload in the presence of, say, a cancer cell. Similar nanocapsules filled with a detergent that causes oil to break free from sediment could be used to seek out hydrocarbons and release detergents onto them right where they are hiding, releasing oil into water that can then ferry it to the surface.
None of these methods is ready for the oilfield just yet, but as the technology progresses -- not just in oil exploration labs, but also in biotech laboratories -- nanoparticles could help oil companies unlock the estimated 360 billion barrels of oil laying unused in U.S. oil wells alone without resorting to further drilling.
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Judge Bans Future Plantings of Genetically Modified Sugar Beets, Throwing Nation’s Sugar Supply into Doubt
95 percent of the existing crop is genetically modified
Genetically modified sugar beets make up about 95 percent of the American sugar beet crop, according to , which manufactures the seeds to resist their proprietary weed-killer, Roundup.
The engineered beets were approved for sale in 2005 and took hold quickly, comprising 95 percent of the crop by the 2008-2009 growing season.
In January 2008, public interest groups sued to challenge the USDA's deregulation of the crop. The Center for Food Safety (CFS), Organic Seed Alliance, Sierra Club and High Mowing Organic Seeds said new seeds should not be planted until the government completes a full environmental assessment, which is required by the National Environmental Policy Act.
Friday's ruling, by Judge Jeffrey S. White of Federal District Court in San Francisco, answers that lawsuit and appears to effectively ban new planting of the genetically modified sugar beets.
This year's crop is not included, however, meaning beets in the ground will still be milled into sugar. The problems could start next year, because the sugar industry has said there are not enough non-genetically modified seeds to make up for the loss of GM ones, according to the .
The , an industry group, says sugar beets are planted across 1.2 million acres in 11 states every year. Half the nation's sugar supply comes from beets, which are sliced and boiled into a thick syrup that is then dried. The other half comes from sugar cane.
Next time you bake a pie, savor that sugary crust, because it might be a lot more expensive to make next year. Don't say we didn't warn you.
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Researchers Unlock the Secrets to Bacteria’s Super-Efficient Microscopic Motor Tech
These tiny bacterial engines have stumped researchers for decades as they've struggled to understand the mechanisms that drive them to such efficiency and agility (the motors can switch from forward to reverse nearly instantaneously). By comparison, the best F1 engines in the world can only convert about 37 percent of the chemical energy in their fuels into power. Yet the bacteria lose almost no energy as they propel themselves away from toxins and toward nutrients.
But that kind of efficiency and agility, salivated over by engine designers, also helps bacteria avoid antibiotics and other threats, and continue to infect even when doctors have put their best treatments in hot pursuit. An understanding of how this bacterial engine works could lead to better methods of destroying antibiotic-resistant bacteria strains like salmonella and staph.
The researchers were able to model the flagellar motor only after spending two years creating a precise three-dimensional model of the machine. What they found surprised them: Evolution, it seems, beat human designers to the electric engine many, many years ago, using positive and negative charges to drive the engine's rotation. The machine bears a close resemblance to the electric motors used today, swapping charges in the motor to switch from a forward to a backward direction.
Of course, now that researchers have figured out how the engine makes bacteria go, they want to figure out how to stop it. If pharmaceuticals could be developed that slow bacteria down, clinicians could stop infections from spreading so quickly -- or perhaps at all -- giving antibiotics a better chance of catching up to them before its too late.
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Stylish Fraunhofer Lab-in-a-Wristwatch Warns of Impending Medical Emergencies Before They Strike
Inconveniently, this prototype wristwatch doesn't tell the time, but it will tell an athlete if his or her perspiration shows signs of dehydration, or whether a person wearing a pacemaker is wandering too close to a dangerous electromagnetic field. It can help an elderly person ensure his or her body temperature doesn't climb too high, and someday might even help diabetics monitor their blood sugar levels around the clock.
The watch itself is actually a mash-up of several lab-on-a-chip technologies, and could be customized for patients based on those conditions for which they are most at risk. Technologically speaking, new ultra-small biomarker sensors emerge all the time, like that can instantly diagnose a heart attack, or single-drop, disposable blood tests that can rapidly scan the blood for indicators of impending thromboses. By stacking them in a single sensory device, the research team hopes to provide a means of catching potentially fatal medical incidents before they get into full swing.
Some of these systems are in their infancy and not necessarily suited for integration into a wristwatch device. The blood clot test, for instance, requires a prick with a needle and is generally only necessary in certain situations wherein the risk of blood clots is elevated, like when a patient is traveling by air (it's also designed for one-time use).
But advances in both polymer electronics and conventional sensors have made these lab-on-a-chip biosensors increasingly small and affordable, meaning in the very near future patients at risk for a battery of illness could wear a diagnostic watch at all times, providing them with a constant stream of biofeedback. And who knows, maybe they'll even integrate a clock into it.
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