1.STRANGE CULTURE
2.GM hens lay eggs to fight cancer
3.Courting Armageddon

GM WATCH COMMENT: The second article below describes how researchers at the Roslin Institute, which created Dolly the sheep, have now bred a 500-strong flock of chickens "genetically modified to lay eggs capable of producing drugs that fight cancer and other life-threatening diseases".

The chickens are "a common breed of egg-laying hen" that produces about 300 eggs, per hen, a year. They "have each had human genes added to their DNA to enable them to produce complex medicinal proteins."

Mark Griffiths of nlpwessex has asked, "How long before human error (or crime) means these chickens get into the food chain?" Mark also wonders, "Why didn't they choose an avian species which is not part of the food chain? Clearly the 300 eggs per year was too tempting for them."

Mark points out that we already have experience of the problems. GM pigs have more than once unintentionally entered the human food chain. In one incident nearly 400 pigs used in GM research accidentally got into the US food supply. The FDA said "it could not verify the researchers' claim [that the pigs weren't dangerous] because they failed to keep enough records"!!

(US biotech researchers careless with 386 pigs - FDA) http://ngin.tripod.com/100203a.htm

Another article on the GM-pig-to-market scandal suggested other animals involved in GM research, such as chickens, goats and cows, could also have entered the food chain.

News also emerged of a previous release of GM pigs:

"One year ago, several genetically altered pigs ended up in Canadian poultry feed. Researchers at the University of Guelph in southern Ontario discovered 11 dead piglets were mistakenly sent to a rendering plant and ground into poultry feed."

http://ngin.tripod.com/100203a.htm

The year before that we had:

"Tainted pork from genetically altered pigs stolen from the University of Florida showed up in sausage served at a funeral in High Springs, university police said.

"The stolen pigs were genetically engineered to develop a disorder similar to diabetic blindness in humans. University officials do not know what effect, if any, the treated meat could have on people who eat it."

We were also told:

"the meat from the pigs... had been genetically altered and injected with enough barbiturates and chemicals to kill a 500-pound pig".

And that:

"The pig incident is one in a series of missteps at the university's Animal Resources department which oversees the treatment of biomedical research animals."

(Tainted pigs show up in sausage at funeral) http://ngin.tripod.com/100203a.htm

Pigs themselves were also put at risk by a lab break out a year later:

"WASHINGTON -- Federal authorities are investigating the disappearance of genetically altered bacteria fatal to pigs that appear to have been stolen from a research laboratory at Michigan State University.

"Investigators said that while the bacteria apparently are harmless to humans, they could devastate the pork industry..."

(Authorities Probe Case Of Missing Bacteria) http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB1032390712851591555,00.html

Then there were the bubonic-plague-ridden GM mice that went AWOL from a lab in New Jersey!

(No good way to spin plague)
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=5728

And let's not forget the US bio-biz that accidentally sent vials of a pandemic flu strain to laboratories across the world - just one of a series of bio-weapons blunders. (item 3)

But compare the lethal cocktail of laxity and hubris surrounding potentially catastrophic biotech experiments with just how far the authorities are prepared to go to face down a non-existent threat from outside the industrial-biotech-military complex - item1.

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1.STRANGE CULTURE
by Mark Bell
(2007-01-20)
2006, Un-rated, 75 minutes
http://www.filmthreat.com/index.php?section=reviews&Id=9553

Exactly how far is the U.S. government allowed to go in order to protect our nation? Some would say as far as humanly possible... but what happens when they react and attempt to punish a nonexistent threat?

These questions are but two of the many that "Strange Culture" stirs in the mind. The documentary concerns the story of Steve Kurtz, an artist and college professor who was preparing an exhibition on genetically modifed food for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition. Part of the exhibition concerned the usage of bacteria and other inocuous biological specimens, as audiences were allowed to test foods with the biological agents to draw conclusions one way or the other. Then, a few days prior to the exhibition, Steve's wife died of heart failure in her sleep.

While responding to the 911 call, paramedics noticed Steve's labeled bacteria specimens, and a few choice books on biological warfare, and they called the FBI, who sent over agents in HazMat suits to quarantine Steve's apartment while he was brought under investigation for possible bio-terrorism. Within hours of his wife's death, he was being detained.

Things get worse from there, as Steve's wife's body is sent around the country and autopsied a number of times. Despite medical proof that she died of a condition not brought on by the harmless bacteria, as well as proof that the bacteria is readily available for ordering online (I don't think you can find Anthrax for $20 on eBay), the government pushes for a bio-terrorism conviction of Steve.

Where the ridiculousness of the situation really presents itself is when the logic process of the government is revealed. Steve had books on terrorism in his apartment, Steve was a particularly open-minded and outspoken professor who may or may not at some point said something negative about how the U.S. is run, he was doing an exhibit that was targeted at the Big Business of Agriculture and the genetic-modification of such (something, in the United States, which is common and, at the same time, not openly expressed on the labels of the foods we ingest), he had bacteria and science equipment in his house and, most laughably, he was invited to another art exhibition and the invite for said exhibition had Arabic writing on it so, therefore, he must be a terrorist.

Where the laughter stops and the tragedy begins is that Steve had just lost his wife, and he didn't even have the opportunity to properly process it and grieve. On top of that, despite every bit of evidence to his innocence, the government presses ever-forward, only instead of simply bio-terrorism they've begun to mix things up a bit. Now he's gone from being investigated for bio-terrorism, to being accused of fraud due to the way he got his scientific equipment via a scientist friend of his (despite the fact that the scientist who also gets accused of fraud and put on trial) has claimed no fraud, the university Steve worked for claims no fraud and the company that the equipment came from claims no fraud, meaning the U.S. is attempting to try a fraud case with no plaintiffs involved). On top of that, the fraud case is a civil one, but steps are being taken to transfer it into a criminal case instead, where Steve could face, instead of fines, up to 20 years in jail.

Why should this case concern us? Because it's all about the precedents. If the government can just detain willy-nilly, find no cause and still move forward, it is a gross abuse of human rights. Plus, if a precedent is set that a civil case can easily be transmuted into a criminal case, the government could start detaining for one reason, going to trial for another and then issuing prison sentences for normally non-criminal cases. Finally, from an artistic stand-point, what is terrorist intent? If you write a book, film a movie, perform a song that is critical of the government, could you then be liable for possible detainment and criminal punishment for simply expressing freedom of speech in a country supposedly built around building and protecting freedom in all ways. Hell, by writing a favorable review of the film, am I therefore supporting bio-terrorism and thus deserving of a government file and possible investigation? Where does the shakey logic against art and intent end? For all of the reasons above and more, this case is extremely important... and it's still ongoing.

Filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson takes a novel approach to the subject of the film, mainly in that the story of Steve's arrest and court trials are still ongoing (yeah, no easy wrap-up or vindication one way or the other in this one) and therefore Steve himself cannot discuss certain details of the case, so instead Leeson uses actors to portray dramatized versions of the events up to and including his arrest.

The actors chosen for the main roles of Steve and his wife are Thomas Jay Ryan and Tilda Swinton, respectively. Ryan looks very little like his real counterpart, but tha's unimportant. What is important is that the audience is given the facts and the opportunity to connect with the idea of Steve Kurtz (as in, he ceases to be a human once he becomes part of a massive legal precedent setting case, instead being transformed into a symbol). Then when the real Steve Kurtz is allowed to speak, you start to relate to him even more.

"Strange Culture" is an important heads-up to what is going on in our country right now in the name of national security, and a brilliant statement on artistic freedom and the dangers it faces. This film should be seen, should be discussed and is an important document on our times.

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2.GM hens lay eggs to fight cancer
Jonathan Leake, Science Editor
The Sunday Times, January 14 2007
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2546462_1,00.html

SCIENTISTS have created the world's first breed of designer chickens, genetically modified to lay eggs capable of producing drugs that fight cancer and other life-threatening diseases.

Researchers at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh, which created Dolly the cloned sheep, have bred a 500-strong flock of the birds.

The breakthrough offers the prospect of mass-producing drugs that currently cost the NHS thousands of pounds a year per patient, at a fraction of the price.

The ISA Browns, a common breed of egg-laying hen, have each had human genes added to their DNA to enable them to produce complex medicinal proteins. These human proteins are secreted into the whites of the birds' eggs, from which they can be easily extracted to produce drugs.

The Roslin scientists have achieved a world first in creating birds that "breed true", meaning the added human genes are passed on from generation to generation. This opens the way for the creation of industrial-scale flocks and offers a potentially unlimited cheap source of medicinal proteins.

One of the chicken lines produces human interferon of a kind closely resembling a drug widely used to treat multiple sclerosis. Such drugs have a potential worldwide market worth hundreds of millions.

Another line could be useful in treating skin cancer, by producing miR24, an antibody that could also potentially treat arthritis, which afflicts 7m people in Britain.

The institute is understood to have created at least two other lines of genetically modified chicken, whose eggs could produce drugs with the potential to fight cancer.

The research is a triumph for Dr Helen Sang, the leader of the Roslin team who, since 1997, has sought to make the technique work without new genes being lost as they are transmitted down the generations. Ian Wilmut, the Edinburgh University professor who created Dolly at Roslin, was an adviser on the project.

"This is potentially a very powerful new way to produce specialised drugs," said Dr Karen Jervis of Viragen Scotland, a biotech company that is working closely with Roslin. "We have bred five generations of chickens so far and they all keep producing high concentrations of pharmaceuticals."

Other researchers have already produced transgenic chickens - with artificially altered DNA - but the ability to make desirable proteins has generally vanished in a generation or two.

At present, therapeutic proteins are mainly made in bio-reactors, vats of bacteria or other cells that have been genetically modified. However, extracting the relevant proteins is expensive and difficult.

In Roslin's research - to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences tomorrow - the scientists will describe how they extracted embryonic cockerels from hens, before the eggs had formed.

The embryos, just small clusters of cells, were then each injected into surrogate eggs and "infected" with a virus genetically modified to contain human genes. These genes contained the blueprint for the human proteins that the researchers were trying to produce.

The virus carried those human genes into the cells of the embryonic cockerels where they became incorporated into the bird's DNA.

When the so-called "founder cockerels" hatched, they were mated with ordinary female hens. Their progeny were found to contain the same human genes and, to the delight of the researchers, the females all produced the desired protein in their eggs.

"In theory, this technique could be used with a wide range of genes, so that hens could be used to make many different proteins," said Andrew Wood of Oxford BioMedica, whose researchers collaborated on the project. "Potentially, this could lead to treatments for ill-nesses including Parkinson's Disease, diabetes and a range of cancers."

The ISA Brown, a French breed that is a cross between Rhode Island Red and Rhode Island White chickens, produces about 300 eggs, per hen, a year.

Some scientists are cautious about the advance, pointing out that biotechnology firms have been promising a new generation of drugs from transgenic animals for nearly two decades.

So far, however, perhaps the world's most successful transgenic animal is the glofish - a tropical fish modified with DNA from a sea anemone and a jelly fish to give it a fluorescent skin. It is used as a pet.

Last year saw a breakthrough for such technologies when European regulators approved the world’s first medicine derived from transgenic animals. ATryn, an anticlotting agent for people with a rare inherited disease, is made from the milk of goats whose DNA has been modified to incorporate human genes.

Dr Barbara Glenn of Bio, which represents the American biotech industry, said the Roslin research was likely to be the first of many similar breakthroughs. "This technique is simply a way of producing human proteins, which is why it is applicable to so many different diseases," she said.

For the NHS, the hope is that such technologies will help to minimise its annual bill for prescription drugs which was £8 billion last year; an increase of 46% since 2000.

Andrew Tyler, the director of Animal Aid, which campaigns to improve animal welfare, said genetically manipulating farm animals was a reckless and dangerous procedure. "The fallout for the animals of creating GM individuals in enormous. The modification process produces many casualties, with young animals being born with defects and females suffering miscarriages and other problems," he said.

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3.Courting Armageddon
How the Bush Administration's Biological Weapons Buildup Affects You
by Heather Wokusch April 14 2005 http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0414-21.htm

News that a U.S. company recently sent vials of a 1957 pandemic flu strain to laboratories across the world by accident is only the latest outrage from the billion-dollar boondoggle called the federal biological weapons program.

As you might recall, the Bush administration started its "biodefense" spending spree following the September 2001 deadly anthrax attacks, and one of its first projects was to genetically engineer a super-resistant, even more deadly version of the anthrax virus.

Our leaders are nuts.

Unfortunately, Project Jefferson has good company.

A US Army scientist in Maryland is currently trying to bring back elements of the 1918 Spanish flu, a virus which killed 40 million people. And a virologist in St. Louis has been working on a more lethal form of mousepox (related to smallpox) - just to try stopping the virus once it's been created.

Lack of oversight and runaway spending are exacerbated by the Bush administration's disrespect for the internationally-recognized Biological Weapons Convention. In short, reduced pressure on weapons labs to issue declarations and allow inspections means less accountability - and more opportunities for secrecy and abuse.

Put bluntly, the increasing number of stateside bioweapons blunders should come as no surprise. In February 2003, for example, the University of California at Davis (UCD) took a full ten days to inform nearby communities that a rhesus monkey had escaped from its primate-breeding facility. Coincidentally, UCD had been vying for government funds to set up its own "hot zone" biodefense lab which could use primates for biological weapons testing. If that monkey had been infected with ebola, or some other virus, it's unclear when or if the public would have been informed.

At roughly the same time that the monkey ditched UCD, the Pentagon unearthed over 2,000 tons of hazardous biological waste in Maryland, much of it undocumented leftovers of an abandoned germ warfare program. Nearby, the FBI was draining a pond for clues into 2001's anthrax attacks.

Doesn't inspire much trust in the transparency of US biological weapons programs. And things appear only to be getting worse.

In 2004, a whopping $6 billion went up for grabs for federal biodefense programs, and laboratories across the country went ballistic trying to get their hands on some of that cash. Predictably, cases of fraud and abuse quickly surfaced.

In June 2004, for example, the Army was caught shirking inspections at a major biodefense lab under its domain. The scandal went back to 1999, when the Army commissioned a biological and chemical weapons-agent lab at Tennessee's Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Oversight regulations obligated the Army to inspect the lab each year thereafter, and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) were supposed to have inspected the lab on a regular basis too.

Everything seemed to be running smoothly; in December 2003, the committee in charge of safety at the Oak Ridge lab announced that it "remains comfortable of the review and inspections of the Chem/Bio Facility conducted by the CDC and the Army."

Small problem. In 2004, the Department of Energy's Inspector General discovered that the Army actually hadn't inspected the Oak Ridge biodefense lab for the previous three years, and that the CDC hadn't been there for four years. Yet the lab's safety committee said it was "comfortable" with the imaginary inspections.

Also in 2004, a military biodefense contractor called Southern Research landed in hot water by accidentally sending live anthrax across the country from Frederick, Maryland to the Children's Hospital of Oakland (California). To make matters worse, it turns out that Southern Research's lab in Frederick, Maryland didn't even maintain the institutional biosafety committee required by federal research rules The punishment for these acts of gross incompetence and irresponsibility? The Bush administration gave Southern Research the task of safeguarding a new $30 million biological weapons facility being built near Chicago.

In September of the same year, three lab workers at the Boston University Medical Center were accidentally exposed to a potentially lethal biowarfare agent called tularaemia bacterium. The lab didn't report the tularemia infections until two months later though - after it had won a contract to build a new, $178 million biodefense laboratory.

Concerns about lack of transparency and monetary waste aside, the administration's bioweapons buildup raises obvious ethical problems. Why should the U.S. create newer, even deadlier viruses? Who are these catastrophic weapons going to be tested on? What populations will they ultimately be used against?

These questions take on urgent meaning given the Bush administration's military adventurism coupled with the US media's poor coverage regarding war victims. For example, eyewitnesses to the late-2004 attack on Fallujah claimed that US forces used poisonous gases, and "weird" bombs that exploded into fires that burned the skin despite water being thrown on the burns - a telltale sign of napalm or phosphorus bombs.

UK reaction to the revelation was swift and strong, with demands that Prime Minister Blair remove British troops from Iraq until the US ceased from using such savage weaponry. Labor MP Alice Mahon demanded that Blair make "an emergency statement to the Commons to explain why this is happening. It begs the question: 'Did we know about this hideous weapon's use in Iraq?'"

No similar outrage in Congress. In fact, no comment at all. The US mainstream media didn't cover the "weird bomb" allegations.

But it doesn't take a genius to put two-and-two together: if we permit our government to ignore international weapons-control conventions and then say nothing while fresh billions are invested in barbaric new weaponry, we lose the right to act surprised when our own military uses that weaponry on innocent civilians abroad.

Or even on us.

You may be surprised to learn that in 2003, the Pentagon quietly admitted to having used biological/chemical agents on 5,842 service members in secret tests conducted over a ten-year period (1962-73).

In operations called Project 112 and Project SHAD, the Defense Department tested its own weapons on service members aboard Navy ships, and in all sorts of other nasty ways - such as spraying a Hawaiian rainforest and parts of Oahu. All in all, tests were conducted in six states (Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Utah) as well as in Canada and Britain.

Many military personnel were not informed when the toxic agents were being tested on them. Only decades later, as crucial documents slowly become declassified, have the veterans' health complaints been acknowledged.

You might think such barbarism could never happen again: too many legal protections for citizens in place. Think again.

There's a tricky clause in Chapter 32/Title 50 of the United States Code (the aggregation of US general and permanent laws) which states that the Secretary of Defense can conduct a chemical or biological agent test or experiment on humans in certain cases "if informed consent has been obtained."

So far so good. But check out a different part of Chapter 32, Section 1515, entitled "Suspension; Presidential authorization":

"After November 19, 1969, the operation of this chapter, or any portion thereof, may be suspended by the President during the period of any war declared by Congress and during the period of any national emergency declared by Congress or by the President."

You got it. If the President or Congress decides we're at war then the Secretary of Defense doesn't need anybody's consent to test chemical or biological agents on human beings. Gives one pause during these days of a perpetual "War on Terror."

In January 2005, US Senate majority leader Bill Frist called for a new Manhattan Project (referring to the WWII-era nuclear weapons bonanza) for biological weapons. Frist told an audience at the World Economic Forum, "The greatest existential threat we have in the world today is biological," and he went on to predict a biowarfare attack "at some time in the next 10 years."

How ironic that while Frist cited the 2001 US anthrax attacks as proof more biological weapons research was necessary, he failed to mention that those incidents involved anthrax produced right in the good 'ole USA - or that the primary suspect in the attacks was a US Army scientist. Frist also didn't clarify how developing even more biological warfare agents would make the world safer.

The original Manhattan Project ultimately led to US forces dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with the resulting slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people. It's terrifying to consider the potential repercussions, both domestic and abroad, of the Bush administration's coveted new biological-weapons Manhattan Project.

Heather Wokusch is a free-lance writer who can be reached via her web site: www.heatherwokusch.com