In some ways this is a very cool idea. But you would have thought these people would have thought this through a little better:
Grow and Eat Your Own Vaccines? Using Plants As mRNA Factories
The future of vaccines may look more like eating a salad than getting a shot in the arm. UC Riverside scientists are studying whether they can turn edible plants like lettuce into mRNA vaccine factories.
Messenger RNA or mRNA technology, used in COVID-19 vaccines, works by teaching our cells to recognize and protect us against infectious diseases.
One of the challenges with this new technology is that it must be kept cold to maintain stability during transport and storage. If this new project is successful, plant-based mRNA vaccines — which can be eaten — could overcome this challenge with the ability to be stored at room temperature.
The project’s goals, made possible by a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, are threefold: showing that DNA containing the mRNA vaccines can be successfully delivered into the part of plant cells where it will replicate, demonstrating the plants can produce enough mRNA to rival a traditional shot, and finally, determining the right dosage.
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding. Does the mRNA only affect the DNA of the plants? Or do the plants deliver something that affects human DNA? If the latter then there is going to be some push back.
If the technology exists to deliver virus gene fragments into humans from food then what prevents food, modified by the evil genus in his basement, from creating an infectious (to plants) disease which delivers a “time bomb” infectious disease to human? For the “time bomb” think of HIV. It shows symptoms easily mistaken for something minor then is quiet, but infectious, for a few months before killing the host. If the lettuce infects other lettuce via insects or is airborne a simple infection of a few fields in scattered locations could infect an entire nation before the first person began to show deadly symptoms.
I don’t know how you practically prepare for that scenario.
Brett may have it right.
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