Should we be pharming with food crops?

Abstract

The accumulated knowledge of common agricultural crops and their breeding for desirable traits has made them interesting as carrier organisms for GE products in pharming. The United States and other governments and institutions should support knowledge-base and biological character development of non-food carrier organisms—such as castor bean or tobacco—to make them attractive to pharmaceutical and chemical companies for transformation and synthesis of GE products in order to separate the growing of food from the growing of chemicals and pharmaceutical.