Outrage
27 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
in craziness, politics Tags: abortion, craziness, politics
This is, umm, interesting:
his proposed statute reads, “No person or entity shall manufacture or knowingly sell food or any other product intended for human consumption which contains aborted human fetuses in the ingredients or which used aborted human fetuses in the research or development of any of the ingredients.”
There are two ways to go with this and I can’t decide between them, so I’ll do both:
- Damn, there goes my business plan.
- So, it’s ok to sell food made out of people?
A bit more seriously, here’s what this is about:
These accusations began with an action alert issued by Largo, Florida-based Children of God for Life, a nonprofit, pro-life organization focused on the “bioethical issues of human cloning, embryonic, and fetal tissue research.” In the alert, Debi Vinnedge, executive director of Children of God, calls for the public to “boycott products of major food companies that are partnering with Senomyx, a biotech company that produces artificial flavor enhancers, unless the company stops using aborted fetal cell lines to test their products.”
…
Though Rosenberg states there is nothing on the company website linking Senomyx with HEK293, a little Googling turned up a patent issued in 2008 for “Recombinant Methods for Expressing a Functional Sweet Taste Receptor,” in which a line item mentions HEK293.
So what exactly is HEK293? It’s a cell line that started in the 1970s from human embryonic kidney cells.
Here’s the Wikipedia entry:
HEK 293 cells were generated in the early 70s by transformation of cultures of normal human embryonic kidney cells with sheared adenovirus 5 DNA in Alex Van der Eb’s laboratory in Leiden, The Netherlands. The human embryonic kidney cells were obtained from a healthy aborted fetus and originally cultured by Van der Eb himself, and the transformation by adenovirus was performed by Frank Graham who published his findings in the late 1970s after he left Leiden for McMaster University in Canada.
The patent actually doesn’t say that this cell line was used in the process, just that the patent applies if they are used. Thus, the reason for the freakout is that a company might be using cell lines in research that are descended from a fetus that was aborted 40 years ago.
Update: The patent actually does say it’s preferable to use HEK 239 cells, so the outrage is completely justified.
