A genetically modified chicken named Britney, has been unveiled by the
Roslin Institute in conjunction with the US biotechnology company Viragen
Inc., of Plantation, Florida, which accomplished cloning of Dolly the
sheep. She and her descendants are intended to join an army of special
purpose medical supply animals that will be introduced to the world in
the coming years.
One company, GeneWorks, of Ann Arbor, Michigan, has reportedly produced
a flock of 60 such chickens, which pass on their genetic modifications
to successive generations.
Each modified chicken should lay about 250 eggs per
year from which a variety of proteins in relatively large volumes can
be easily extracted, functioning as mini pharmaceutical
plants.
One such group, Compassion in World
Farming, claims that genetically modifying animals to produce medicine
is unnecessary because there are alternative ways to do it.
A spokesman for Friends of the Earth,
which has long campaigned against genetically modified food, said "Genetically
modifying animals so they become drug factories raises serious ethical
questions. The technology is well ahead of the debate."
So far, pigs, sheep, goats, bacteria and fungi have been genetically
modified to produce:
- Other medical materials
aimed at treating diabetes, cancer,
multiple sclerosis and a host of other ailments.
Another American company, AviGenics, claims the
ability to engineer its chickens to produce a chemical for treating cancer
and has managed to pass on the necessary gene to further generations of
birds.
AviGenics advertises itself as a specialist in avian
transgenesis, and company materials say that eggs from transgenic poultry
can yield large quantities of valuable proteins at relatively low cost,
giving the pharmaceutical industry "a very low-cost protein expression
system."
Compassion in World
Farming's Joyce da Silva said: "It's as if
we are determined to develop a sub-class of animals which have been tampered
with so we can extract things which might possibly be of benefit to man."
Viragen Inc. is primarily known as a firm that wants
to distribute worldwide a proprietary brand of interferon made from white
blood cells supplied largely by The Red Cross in the United States and
Europe.