"Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research: human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids and buying, selling or patenting human embryos."
With these words, President Bush has declared his desire to end the manufacture of insulin. Read on.
The first recorded insulin injection was administered in 1922 to a fourteen-year-old diabetic. The insulin--extracted from a bovine pancreas--was impure, and the patient suffered a severe allergic reaction as a result, but it was nonetheless an important milestone in the treatment of diabetes. In the years that followed, the extraction and purification process was refined, and injectable insulin turned a once fatal affliction into a manageable, if lifelong, condition. There were still issues with extracted insulin; allergic reactions remained a problem, as trace amounts of impurities remained in the insulin extracted from cows, pigs, and fish.
Then, in 1982, the first manufactured human insulin was released. Thanks to advances in genetic engineering, it was possible to splice human genetic material into non-human organism--brewer's yeast--and have that organism and its offspring produce human insulin in large quantities.
At this point, the problem with the President's statement against human/animal hybrids is evident. Insulin-producing yeast is a human-animal hybrid; it contains both natural yeast genetic material and artificially-inserted genetic material from a human being. While it may not rise to the standard of shambling, grotesque pig-man beasts roaming the countryside in search of B-list actors to devour, insulin-producing yeast is, genetically, a human/animal hybrid. While it's easy to say that insulin-producing yeast isn't the same thing as pigs with human-transplantable organs growing inside them, it's harder to actually define the distinction between "acceptable" and "reprehensible" human/animal hybrids.
Thus, while one can safely assume that the President has absolutely no interest in ending the manufacture of human insulin in this manner, one can just as safely assume that any legislation crafted on this issue will have been crafted largely by individuals who are not genetic engineers, and the resulting legislation will have serious shortcomings resulting in very real repercussions for much of our medical research. Watch this issue very closely. If it turns out to have more legs than ending steroids in baseball or manned missions to Mars, we could be in for a serious fight for medical research, scientific freedom, and medications--both currently available and yet to be discovered--that keep millions alive on a daily basis.
