Originally published July 24 2005
Pharmaceutical crops offer new drug production choices; critics fear food contamination
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Underground drug farms grow genetically altered crops -- tomatoes, corn, tobacco, etc. -- that can produce a number of pharmaceuticals beneficial to humans, but the crops themselves are usually harmful if ingested, and Popular Science reports many experts fear the pharmaceutical crops will infect regular food crops.
Don't tell anyone, but Doug Ausenbaugh has built an underground drug farm---in bucolic southern Indiana, no less.
It's cleverly cached in an old limestone mine near the hamlet of Marengo.
Drug companies have hailed this new field, known as biopharming, as a low-cost alternative to traditional manufacturing.
But environmentalists, food-industry officials and other critics have decried pharma crops---which aren't meant to be eaten and in some cases are toxic to humans---because of the danger of contaminating food supplies.
Aventis CropScience, the corn's grower, quickly abandoned the product and was forced to pay $2.4 million to people who said they had suffered allergic reactions to it.
Two years later, federal officials fined the biotech company ProdiGene $3 million for allowing pharma corn carrying an experimental pig vaccine to contaminate soybeans in Iowa and Nebraska.
Regulations have since been tightened, and the young industry suffered a huge blow when biotech behemoth Monsanto abandoned its biopharming research in 2003.
The 60-acre mine in Indiana provides a formidable barrier between the grow room and the rest of the world, easing the burden of containment in several ways.
What's more, the constant 51�F air temperature in the cavern serves as a natural cooling system for the hot grow lights.
All things considered, a properly run underground facility "would probably be an order of magnitude safer" than a surface operation for a typical crop such as corn, says geneticist Norman Ellstrand of the University of California at Riverside.
As a result, it would let growers sidestep some of the regulatory rigmarole to which biopharming is usually subjected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture---one of at least three federal agencies that scrutinize the various aspects of production, along with the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration.
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