Do you know what we ate tonight? Tater Tot Casserole. I would tell you the recipe but you probably don't need it to imagine what's involved. There are frozen potatos, there is canned soup, there's a lot of sodium...
And then after this supper, which David loves and that's why it makes an appearance around here, I log onto Facebook and what do I see? This article and then this article, which both explain, disturbingly, how a biofirm is using cells, whose many-times predecessors originated in an aborted human fetus, to create flavour sensors.
It seems that Pepsi and many other companies including Nestle, Cadbury, Cambell's etc. have apparently been purchasing and using (for who knows how long) flavour enhancers created by a biotech firm called Senomyx. Senomyx makes their flavour enhancers using information derived from testing on cells from a fetus aborted in the 70s. The cells have been genetically modified and are not, of course, the original cells, but they originated from human cells. Senomyx has altered the cells to function as our tastebuds would, to test for taste sensations, and then creates products using this data. So the cells aren't IN the food, but are used to create the food.
I don't know about you, but I find the whole idea of this Frankenscience to be very, very disturbing. Modified cells from a dead child in the 70s being used to make my soup taste better? This is...acceptable science? "Ordinary business"? Generally okay? Have I missed something?
Now, as usual the pro-life front is being made to sound as though they are a bunch of crazy, slightly slow third graders and the companies are pshawing left, right and centre about how their stockholders and the general public should just lie back and think of the empire and not worry their pretty little heads about all that technical stuff, but regardless of the typecasting and general sleaze of the situation, the facts are pretty grim.
So, I did what any researcher would do, I looked a little deeper. Where did these cells (called HEK 293 cells) come from, specifically? If Wikipedia is to be believed, they were acquired from an aborted fetus in the early 1970's, but whether the abortion was natural or induced, they couldn't say. Not that it particularly matters - I would say that cadaver experimentation regarding food is fairly verboten across most cultural lines here. However, I would guess that the abortion wasn't natural for several reasons: Firstly, if the abortion was natural, and there was any proof of this whatsoever, the companies would be using this information to their advantage. "Well, yes, we use these cells, BUT the abortion was a natural one and the body 'donated to science'." would be what we'd hear, and we don't, so...
Secondly, the fetus is always referred to as a 'healthy, aborted fetus'. Healthy fetuses tend not to abort. They tend, in fact, to continue being healthy and end up being born.
Thirdly, the fetus was acquired in the 'early 1970's' when the rise of feminism led to more and more abortions in general while any laws governing the process were still very basic at best. That the cells weren't acquired at another time isn't itself a finger pointing at induced abortion, but it's certainly an interesting sidenote and, I would argue, a possible explanation for this. The Netherlands, where the laboratory that initially produced HEK 293 was located, didn't legalize abortion until the early to mid 1980's, but "Legalization reached the forefront of public debate in the Netherlands during the 1970s as many other Western European countries liberalized their laws." which leads me to believe that the fetus could have simply been 'imported' as medical waste from a neighbouring country with more liberal laws.
Finally, a natural abortion, called a miscarriage, is not likely to find a mother willing to 'donate' her unborn child to science. If the miscarriage was very early it would likely manifest itself as a heavier than normal period with all that that entails, and if it were later, it would likely result in a stillbirth.
So, we have the probable induced abortion of a fetus. And now Senomyx is one of many companies that has used cells derived from this initial fetus to make 'flavour enhancers'.
Are you grossed out? Disturbed? Indignant? Or is this just me?
1 comment:
It's not just you. And somehow, the fact that the cells are 30+ years old, recycled and recycled down through the years, makes it even more disturbing. Not only has our food been "pre tasted" by something created from a dead child, but it's the cloned ghost of a dead child being used.
I don't think this is something unsettling to just people who are pro-life. I'd be willing to bet that a fair amount of the pro-abortion population would be disturbed by this.
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