The Science™ Bioengineers Cows to Produce Insulin-Infused Milk

There may be an unexpected fix for ongoing shortages of insulin: A brown bovine in Brazil recently made history as the first transgenic cow able to produce human insulin in her milk.

"Mother Nature designed the mammary gland as a factory to make protein really, really efficiently," explained study leader Matt Wheeler, a professor of animal sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. "We can take advantage of that system to produce a protein that can help hundreds of millions of people worldwide."

His team, which included scientists from the University of São Paolo, described how they developed the insulin-making cow in a report published March 12 in Biotechnology Journal.

Here is an excerpt of the study, in which scientists injected cows with a viral vector to induce genetic changes that caused them to produce insulin, via Biotechnology Journal (emphasis added):

Using transgenic animals as bioreactors to produce proteins of pharmaceutical interest has been proposed as an efficient alternative to increase protein production while decreasing costs. The mammary gland is a tissue where posttranslational modifications are possible for large-scale recombinant protein production. The first step in this process is to produce transgenic animals containing a transgene that drives recombinant protein expression in a tissue-specific manner in the mammary gland. The vector constructed in this study was evaluated for gene expression of hINS by induction of transduced and nontransduced MAC-T cells cultured on polystyrene using lactogenic hormones. Mammary epithelial cells have been used as a model for mammary gland function studies and can produce milk proteins…

The combination of gene transfer mediated by lentivirus and SCNT methodologies used in this work successfully generated a transgenic calf that contains the gene to produce human proinsulin in milk.

Now imagine if scientists put as much effort into figuring out why so many people need insulin injections in the first place — a hormone produced in sufficient quantity in the human pancreas by healthy humans for thousands of years without the need for cows injected with viruses to produce mutant proteins to be farmed by pharmaceutical corporations for $10,000 a vial.

The vast, vast majority of diabetics have type II diabetes — meaning that their cells have been pounded by so much insulin as a result of carbohydrate intake that insulin no longer works as it’s supposed to. This form of diabetes is the result of lifestyle and diet. It can also be reversed by lifestyle and diet, eliminating the need for exogenous insulin. Anyone who says anything to the contrary, like your kindly local pharmaceutical rep, is lying or ignorant.

Only a very tiny portion of diabetics — 0.55% of the U.S. population, as opposed to 8.6% of the U.S. population with type II diabetes — actually have type I diabetes, a congenital condition in which the pancreas is destroyed by the immune system and no longer produces insulin. These individuals do require insulin because they no longer have the capacity to produce it.

There is more than enough insulin in circulation currently to supply the needs of the segment of the population that belongs to the latter category, which requires it by no fault of its own.

As far as I am concerned, all of this cow genetic modification business is only in the service of wrecking the genome and further facilitating continued sloth and gluttony on the part of obese sinners.

Is my sentiment judgmental? Admittedly. I find morbid obesity aesthetically distasteful and morally indefensible, excepting those with legitimate medical conditions that cause weight gain — again, an infinitesimally tiny segment of the population.

Is my distaste for obesity fascistic, even? According to MSNBC, yes.

Is judging the fats Christlike? Probably not; I am a fallen, mortal being.

That said, I have nothing but respect and admiration for individuals who take charge of their lives and lose the weight they so desperately need to lose, if for the sake of nothing else than their overtaxed hearts.