AWARENESS,PRACTICE PRESENT MOMENT AWARENESS, THE MEANING YOU YEARN FOR LIVES IN THE EVER PRESENT NOW.


Regulators stymie 'human trees'
From AFP
May 13, 2004
A SCHEME by two London artists to take DNA from a dead person and insert it into apple trees to create a living memorial of that individual's "biological essence" has run headlong into problems.

Royal College of Art graduates Georg Tremmel and Shiho Fukuhara want to insert a stretch of genetic material from a dead loved-one into the genome of an apple tree.

Their symbolic goal: every cell in the tree will have a genetic echo of that person, and the heritage will be handed on forever in the tree's fruit.

Tremmel's and Fukuhara's idea has proven so successful that Britain's National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (NESTA) has earmarked 35,000 pounds to help the duo's company, Biopresence, get off the ground.

Their goal is to market the engineered trees at 20,000 pounds each.

Not so fast, the weekly magazine New Scientist reports in its next edition, published on Saturday. Problem No. 1 has been technical.

The two artists have had to water down their original proposal, which was to insert a uniquely individual sequence of "junk" human DNA into the tree's genome. Junk DNA is so called because it is part of the genetic code that does not control proteins.

But, fearing ethical and safety objections, the pair have now backed off, and have decided instead to embed a coded version of a human DNA sequence into an apple gene -- but without changing the gene's length or the protein that it controls.

But the only known way of doing this is extraordinarily complex and time-consuming (and thus expensive) because the sequence has to go through eight coding steps.

The other problem is even more daunting: British regulators.

Every single tree will have to be approved by the Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment (ACRE), a watchdog that vets applications for genetically-modified organisms.

This will require Biopresence to produce exhaustive test result for every order it receives

I AM STILL DECIDING WETHER OR NOT I LIKE THIS OR NOT. I AM LEANING TOWARDS THE NOT.....A LITTLE BIT TOO FREAKY FOR ME.