Instructor: Farmers, Consumers, and GMOs.
This is part two of our introduction,
and we're gonna stay with the idea
that we're living in a changing world.
And we're gonna take a look at a disease problem
that seems to be a growing problem.
Not from the perspective of farmers
in dealing with the disease on their crop,
but disease that many consumers deal with.
And the disease that we'll talk about is diabetes.
That's the ability of your body
to control the blood sugar level.
And there's a number of ways
you could try to deal with that,
diet, exercise, or a number of those factors.
So let's take a look at how this problem is changing.
What percentage of the US population has diabetes?
Do you think it's less than 1%?
Do you think it's about 1%?
Or do you think it's all the way up to about 10%?
This was in 2014 when I got this data, and I was surprised.
About 10%, just under 10% of the US population
is dealing with this disease.
It's a growing problem.
So let's think about the biology of diabetes.
The key to being able to control the blood sugar level
in your bodies is residing in the ability
of a fairly simple protein
that you have the instructions for in your genome.
The protein's called insulin.
Insulin protein acts like a hormone.
It's made in one part of your body, and moves to others.
And as it
interacts with the cells in your body,
it regulates how they take up, or don't take up,
the sugar that's available to it as an energy source.
And that's a critical capability that we take for granted
when our bodies make insulin,
and the insulin's working as it's biologically designed.
But if you're diabetic, you aren't making insulin,
or aren't making enough insulin.
So prior to the 1980s,
where did people with diabetes get their insulin?
Did they get it from their diet such as soybean seeds?
Did they get it from pigs?
Or did they get it from cultured microbes?
Well, the answer is they got the insulin from pigs.
Now, they didn't get human insulin from pigs.
They got pig insulins in their pancreas.
Just like we make insulin in our pancreas,
pigs make insulin themselves
to control their blood sugar levels.
So you can extract pig insulin from slaughtered pigs,
and carefully try to purify the pig insulin,
give it to patients with this diabetes disease,
and in some cases, it works fine.
In all cases, it's rather expensive.
And in some cases,
the patients would have a negative reaction
to the pig version of the insulin protein.
So there were numerous problems associated
with trying to use pig insulin
to control the insulin level in people with diabetes.
There had to be a better solution.
So it's something that the medical scientists worked on.
So let's fast forward to today.
Now where do people with diabetes get insulin?
Do they now get it from soybeans?
Do they get it from other people?
Or do they get it from cultured microbes?
They no longer typically use pig insulin
as a source for diabetics.
Where do they get it now?
How have things changed?
Well, the answer is they get the insulin
from microbes that are cultured by pharmaceutical companies.
Now what's interesting is these microbes
have the ability to actually make the human version
of the insulin protein.
And the reason they can is because they're GMOs.
They have a gene from humans
that encodes the insulin protein
transferred into their cells,
and they can faithfully use that human gene information
and make the human protein.
And then that human insulin protein can be extracted
and purified from the cultured cells.
It's far less expensive than the extraction
of pig insulin from the pig pancreas,
and it's safer because it's the human version
of the insulin protein.
So because of the ability to do gene transfer
from humans to microorganisms
in the 1980s,
an improvement in the status
of people with diabetes was achieved.
So that was obviously a case where the use
of genetic engineering technology was beneficial,
and generally, not controversial,
not something that consumers opposed.
So what we wanna be able to do
in the Farmers, Consumers, and GMO learning environment
is gain a better understanding
of the biological difference between GMOs and non-GMOs.
How are they really different,
and how are they similar to each other?
And then we can better evaluate the different kinds
of applications for this GMO technology,
and do a better job of deciding whether or not
this would be a good choice, or not a good choice,
or understanding some of the differences
in people's opinion about the use of the technology.
So we will continue our learning
with Farmers, Consumers, and GMOs.