I'm Joan Burnside from the University of Delaware from the Department of Animal and Food Sciences and the Delaware Biotechnology Institute. I got my PHD a number of years ago in Biochemistry and since then have been studying the endocrinology of animals, molecular biology and molecular biochemistry. Since coming to the University of Delaware my research has focused on the genomics of chickens. With a particular interest in trying to understand what genes in the immune system are involved in the resistance to disease. Raising chickens in close quarters, close environments means that the birds are exposed and susceptible to a large number of diseases and if we could get a better understanding of what genes confer resistance we could really improve production characteristics in the poultry industry.

What does transgenic mean to you?

Now a transgenic organism is an organism whose genome has been modified by foreign DNA. And this is done using what has become very routine genetic engineering or recombinant DNA technology. The technology allows the transfer of DNA between species. This was not previously possible by normal routine breeding techniques. Now, transgenic animals represent an enormous research tool. They can be used to model human disease. They can be used for the targeted production of pharmaceuticals that are of use to humans. And also they can be used to modify production characteristics of animals that are raised for food or milk in our country.

What is a controversial issue? How does it relate to transgenics?

Let me describe a very early application of transgenic technology, one that many of you are probably familiar with. It's been around for about fifteen years. A bacteria harboring a transgene expressing bovine growth hormone, also known as bovine somatotropin was produced and this bacteria was used to make a large amount of bovine growth hormone and this growth hormone was then administered to cows to improve their milk production. And it worked quite satisfactorily. There was increased milk yield from dairy cows and the milk appeared to be of exactly the same consistency as milk from untreated dairy cows. And it appeared to be a very safe application of recombinant DNA technology and transgenic technology. We raise the question, "Is this really a safe product?". There's a lot of concern in the public eye about the safety of transgenic technology. So this is a very good example. The milk has pretty much the same composition. Well you have to also ask the question, "Is it safe for the cow to have his kind of a treatment?" We have to consider animal welfare issues when we discuss safety. There's been some reports that cows that are treated with growth hormone and have an increase in milk production have an increase in mastitis. These are issues that probably cows that have an endogenously high milk production also have to deal with. So it's not clear that this is just a cause of increased production with the treatment of growth hormone. Now this isn't really a transgenic animal. This is the use of an engineered protein on an animal. But you can follow that to the logical course. If you can show improved production characteristics by treatment with a protein then the next step would be to engineer an animal to make more of this protein itself.

What is the potential impact on society?

This has a pretty big impact on society. If we accept that the milk is safe and all research has indicated that it is safe and we accept that the mastitis is not a serious problem or at least a manageable problem, we still have an increase in problems in society. If we accept that the milk is safe and that the mastitis is not a serious problem in the cows or that it can be managed safely we still have a problem in terms of economic impact. This is a technology that can be handled best on an economy of scale. So what happens to a smaller producer who can't afford to buy into this technology? What happens if the public sort of turns its eye against this kind of a product with some suspicion towards its safety? Then those of us who are lucky enough to live in a rich country can afford to buy the other product because it's more expensive than the recombinant generated milk. But what about the people in the poorer country who can't afford to do it. The price becomes the driving issue. So it's not only the science of transgenesis, it's the economics of the impact of transgenic animals that have to be considered in dealing with this kind of issue. There's also some issues with the impact on the environment, maybe less so with production animals such as cows. But you could conceive of releasing this transgene into the natural population. And if it has a selected advantage then you have reduced speciation of species in the wild. So say if an animal that has been treated with growth hormone or is harboring a growth hormone transgene grows bigger, has a reproductive advantage, consumes much more of the food you could see how that could logically take over a large component of the environment that it's released in. So animal breeding has been very closely monitored for many, many years. It's not likely to be a problem with cows or sheep or pigs or chickens because of the way that they are raised for production. But this could conceivably be a problem with aqua culture where the fish are actually raised in close quarters, but they're in their natural environment and they could escape and they could begin breeding with other animals in the wild. So in considering transgenics, it's not only a scientific issue, "Can we do this very very safely?", "Yes, we probably can.". But we have a lot of environmental impact issues and economic impact issues that have to be considered. So it becomes a very cross-disciplinary study to try and determine whether or not this is safe for consumers.

Safety is a major concern with consumers. Many people want a guarantee that biotech foods are 100% safe. Is this realistic?

Now if we know that consumers would like to know that they have a one-hundred percent guarantee that a transgenic product is safe, that can't happen, that can't be offered. Everything has a risk and a benefit and these need to be weighed. We have to consider what aspect of transgenesis we're talking about. The majority of transgenic animals that are in existence right now are mice, by far the majority. And these are used for medical research to model human disease, to test pharmaceuticals. They are invaluable. It is clear that the benefits outweigh the risks when using transgenic mice in research. There's virtually no risk. And in fact we can develop cell lines from some of these mice and use those for testing and thus reduce the use of mice or any kind of animal in research for human disease. Transgenic animals can also be used as bioreactors to produce pharmaceuticals that are important for human disease. This is sometimes referred to as pharmaceutical farming. It's a very cost effective alternative to producing proteins when using cell culture. Cell culture requires huge bioreactors. You have to adjust the growth culture conditions very, very precisely and control it very carefully and then go unpurify the protein, whereas an animal can produce much the same protein at a much less expensive cost. Again, you have very few risks and very strong benefits. And in fact there are some animals available now that produce a number of human proteins. For example, the Gensyn Corporation produces a goat that has alpha one anti-tripsin inhibitor in it that's useful for the treatment of emphysema. This company can purify the protein out of the goat's milk and then it's ready for treatment of people. Again, very, very few risks, very, very strong benefits. Transgenic animals are also being used to develop organs that can be transplanted into humans. This is of enormous benefit. If you were on an organ transplant wait list. Now we're not quite ready to use these organs. Pig bowels have been used for years, forty years I guess, in treating heart disease in humans, but there's a risk of rejection. But now we can engineer pigs that they would have the histocompatibility antigens on their tissues same as humans. You could even design it to a particular human so that the chances of rejection are really, really reduced. So transgenics, strong benefits. But then we get to the issue of making transgenic animals for production characteristics, to improve the production characteristics. So we might want to make a beef animal that had more muscle. We might want to make a chicken that had more breast meat, grew faster, used less food. There's a number of production characteristics that you might think about that we have the technology to alter, but then we have the environmental risks and we have the economic impacts that we have to take into consideration. Perhaps the biggest argument is about reduced speciation, the risk of letting these animals into the wild. I think that students who are undertaking studies of transgenic animals have to realize that this is a cross-disciplinary study and that they have to become aware of evolution. If they're talking about transgenic plants they have to deal with entomology, pest management and what the impact is on the environment from that level. They have to consider various factors all the way down the line besides just the molecular biology of engineering the animal. You have to put aside some of the special interest groups who will dismiss the science in favor of an ethical issue. Those are separate from the scientific issues. They're separate from the economic issues of transgenic animals.