Publications

Medical Scribblings - April 2 / 2003

I went to a medical conference in Canada last summer and stopped over in Toronto. The hospital there is famous for the discovery by Banting & Best of Insulin. They extracted it from the pancreases of animals as this was the only source. We continued to get it this way until about 20 years ago when a company was able to Genetically Modify (GM) a bacteria to produce the insulin. Since then many important drugs have been produced similarly and have transformed some forms of treatment. A good example would be growth hormone for children of short stature.

One great advantage of this approach is that the product is much purer than that extracted from animals and indeed, this caused problems at the start as patients had to reduce the dose of insulin that they needed. The other important thing is that diseases are not passed on with the product as did happen with the treatment for a bleeding condition known as haemophilia. In this case the necessary factor was extracted from blood and was found to carry viruses.

I’m afraid that I have got rather carried away with technical stuff but the reason for explaining this is to give you some understanding of GM products. These are treated in the media as though they were a terrible thing and certainly each product needs careful testing and consideration. It may be that the food products could be very valuable to people arround the world. As an example a common cause of blindness in poor countries is shortage of vitamin A. There is now a variety of rice available that produces this naturally so that people eating the rice will get their necessary supplement.

What is needed is a balanced discussion of the options available to us, for without GM many thousands if not millions of people will suffer unnecesssary ill health or even death.

As I said earlier we now have 20 years of experience with using drugs produced this way and they have been remarkably safe and effective. I feel sure that we will have to think about these things a lot more in the coming years.

John Schofield