Insulin is an abomination: Recent bad news about food

Insulin is an abomination. Sure, injecting it saves the lives of millions of diabetics, but that injected protein is unnatural and abhorrent, the product of a genetically modified organism! And it’s not even necessary: Rather than playing God to coax single-celled creatures never designed for insulin production to make the stuff, we could be harvesting it naturally, like we used to just a few decades ago. After all, one need only slaughter about 20,000 pigs or cows to provide a pound of insulin!

If this argument strikes you as absurd or even horrific, it should. A protein is a protein; if we specify its sequence of amino acids, or the gene that encodes that sequence, we determine the resulting molecule.* The human insulin protein made by human cells with human insulin genes is, atom for atom, the same human insulin protein made by a yeast cell engineered to express a human insulin gene. Even if one were, for some reason, repulsed by the thought of yeast making a human protein, one would hopefully weigh that repulsion against the misery of many people suffering from Type 1 diabetes, and conclude that the misery should be avoided. [* Yes, there can be post-translational modifications, but we understand these, too!]

And yet, if the ailment is childhood blindness, we choose misery. Not all of us, of course, but a vocal contingent that includes Greenpeace. The protein of interest here is beta-carotene, the precursor to Vitamin A, the lack of which causes blindness in hundreds of thousands of children each year. One can coax rice to express the beta-carotene gene in its grains, giving “Golden Rice.” Does it work to counteract Vitamin A deficiency? Yes. Is it safe? Yes. The patents are even publicly owned! In 2021, the Philippine government approved the commercial planting of Golden Rice, after 20 years of debate. “Officials hoped to have the variety comprise 10% of the nation’s rice harvest within 8 years, enough to meet the needs of all vitamin A deficient households,” according to a news piece in Science. Greenpeace and other groups, however, filed a lawsuit to block Golden Rice, and a few weeks ago (April 2024) a Philippine Court of Appeals squashed the Golden Rice permit. (The Science piece gives a good summary.)

Aside from a general, unsubstantiated squeamishness about genetic modification and an unscientific belief that anything can be “proven safe,” there is no reason for the ban. Opponents of Golden Rice also note that there are ways of obtaining a balanced diet that provides Vitamin A that don’t require Golden Rice. This is true, but it’s also true that diabetics can do a lot to manage blood glucose without injecting insulin; we don’t deny them medicine because of this. (And, presumably, the stunning prevalence of childhood blindness means it’s not easy, in many places, to secure proper nutrition.) As 100 Nobel Laureates noted a few years ago, Greenpeace’s opposition to Golden Rice is a “crime against humanity.”

I wonder what Greenpeace’s thoughts on insulin are — for the past few decades, we have produced it using genetically modified yeast. Would they ban it? And if not, why not?

A digression — 50% off!

The story of how insulin became the first biologically produced, engineered pharmaceutical is a fascinating one, mixing science, commerce, and public policy. I describe this, and Golden Rice, in my pop-science biophysics book (Link; Blog post). If you’re reading this in May, 2024: Princeton University Press is having a 50% off sale on most of their books! Including mine!

More generally, Princeton University Press publishes a lot of excellent books. A few recommendations:

• The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality, by Paige Harden. Link
• Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit by Ashley Mears Link
• The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages Link

Now back to depressing news about food

Anti-scientific food policy isn’t the sole domain of the left. Last week, the state of Florida banned lab-grown meat. Here, rather than proteins, we consider whole cells or collections of cells, growing in a laboratory container rather than in animal flesh, but again having the same genes and proteins. The Florida legislature passed a pair of bills, signed enthusiastically into law by governor Ron DeSantis.

The motivations here seem to be a paranoid opposition to “the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs” (DeSantis), as well as wanting to protect Florida’s livestock industry from competition. Florida state representative Tyler Sirois adds that lab-grown meat is an “affront to nature and creation” (source, Food&Wine.com). I wonder if Sirois and others are unaware of how “unnatural” much of contemporary meat production is. American chickens, for example, weight four times as much as they did in the 1950s, and the conditions of animals in factory farms are surely an affront to something!

Both the Golden Rice and the lab-grown meat policies also share a worrying paternalism. I can certainly understand people not wanting to eat lab-grown meat, just for aesthetic or cultural reasons. That’s fine; no one is forcing them to buy it. But to bar others from choosing such food, under force of law, seems strangely dictatorial.

To end on a slightly positive note: when I’ve taught non-science-major students about Golden Rice, the response is uniformly that the opposition to it is puzzling. There is, therefore, hope that education can provide enlightenment.

Today’s illustration

A doodle of insulin molecules, based on this structure.

— Raghuveer Parthasarathy. May 10, 2024