No trouble at the henhouse  |  January 16, 2007  

The Roslin Biocentre of Edinburgh, Scotland (of Dolly The Sheep fame) recently announced that it has created genetically modified chickens that produce very high levels of cancer-fighting proteins naturally within their egg whites.

Frankly, I find this incredibly exciting. Want to read the technical details? Your best bet is probably to go here and have a look for yourself. You'll get to read an assortment of details on miR24 monoclonal antibodies, human interferon b-1a, and a veritable slew of other biologyspeak that I can't make any sense of whatsoever. But that's beside the point—we have cancer-fighting chickens, people.

This is great news, and it enhances the status and profile of the biotech industry. This is what biotech is all about—using modern science to make our food and lives better and safer. Unfortunately, the mainstream media has been relatively mute on this subject, which leaves me wondering: if cancer-fighting chickens can't get some play on the 6 o'clock news then what does it take?

Do these chickens have to start firing iPhones out of their bodies for anybody to start paying attention?
We get wall-to-wall coverage of Donald Trump vs. Rosie O'Donnell, but nobody mentions the cancer-fighting chickens. We may have a living, breathing tool in the fight against cancer, that can be maintained with run of the mill chicken feed.

Could disease-fighting animals be the start of an entirely new industry? There has been much public distrust of genetically modified food (especially in Europe) and this could be one of the ways to get nay-sayers on board. What if genetically modifying food wasn't about increasing yields and product uniformity, but about improving the health and safety of everybody involved? Can we take a cow, and make its milk fight heart disease? Can we take a goat and make it produce antibodies that fight malaria?

Can you think of a better way to get people to buy your product than to make it combat deadly diseases? Sounds like added value to me.

I guess this is a microcosm for the entire world of commerce. Business today is a lot like a bunch of people picking up every chicken in every coop and looking for that one golden egg that makes everybody rich. Somebody, somewhere, is financing the research on these cancer-fighting chickens and that person is going to be very, very wealthy if this all pans out. Cancer-fighting proteins growing naturally in chickens...

Sounds like a golden egg to me.

Andrew Rideout