Consuming (f)ears of corn: public health and biopharming.

I'm convinced that physical containment is overrated and, while reassuring to the psyche, is hardly the line of defense one would like to put the greatest reliance upon.1 So what you have to keep asking yourself is: Suppose the worst happens, what are the consequences? I. INTRODUCTION We have entered the biotech century. Advances in biotechnology3 are already transforming medicine, agriculture, and industry in ways undreamt of thirty years ago, and the pace of scientific advances can only be expected to accelerate. Just as the industrial revolution completely transformed the era of craft and guild production, the world that biotechnology produces may be all but unrecognizable from today's vantage point.4 One of the most controversial and exciting prospects of biotechnology is biopharming-a process in which plants are genetically modified so that they endogenously produce specialty pharmaceutical or industrial proteins.5 Many such crops are currently being planted in small test plots throughout the country.6 Once they are fully developed and approved, these biopharm crops will be grown in the same agricultural fields that are currently devoted to producing traditional agricultural crops.7 Biopharm companies envision a lucrative future in which agricultural fields, converted into biofactories, grow the raw materials for industrial or pharmaceutical production. Among the dazzling possibilities are plants that produce specialty industrial compounds like biodegradable plastics8 and polyesters;9 or drugs to treat a variety of human diseases, such as cancer, HIV, and Alzhcimer's.10 The allure of these crops is clear-an environmentally sustainable11 and inexpensive replacement for costly drugs and petrochemicals.12 At the same time, there are some jarring points of tension, if not outright contradiction, between widespread planting of biopharm crops and the ongoing expectation of a safe and secure food supply.13 Biopharming frequently uses corn and other food crops as production vehicles, but these crops are emphatically not food and are not intended for human consumption.14 Biopharm crops, therefore, pose "a wholly different order" of environmental and human health risks.15 Despite the unique risks, biopharm crops have been tested in fields across the country under the same laissez-faire standards used for first-generation genetically modified ("GM") crops-with minimal and poorly enforced safety precautions based on physical containment.16 In the last decade, biotech companies and research universities have violated even those minimal safety precautions more than a hundred times.17 Because many of these open-air field tests of experimental biopharm crops take place in the Corn Belt, these violations put the food supply at a high risk for contamination.18 Contamination of food crops with non-food, biopharm compounds is a serious threat to human safety and could result in rapid dissemination of non-food pharmaceutical or industrial compounds through the world food supply. There is no room for trial and error. Once contamination occurs, it will be next to impossible to reverse this process and "uncontaminate" the food supply.19 Unfortunately, important safety issues have been sidelined in order to facilitate rapid growth of this nascent industry. First and foremost, readily available and far safer alternatives could be used instead of food crops for biopharm production. But, because market forces diverge from the public's interest on this point, those safer options have not been pursued. Without government action forcing innovation towards achieving public health ends, it is clear that these options will remain unexplored. At the very least, there should be a moratorium on field testing these crops until a host of health-related questions are answered. Among the most pressing questions are: Do biopharm residues bioaccumulate?20 Is there a threshold below which these compounds can be safely consumed? …