Tough Growing Drugs

Biopharming shifts its focus away from corn:

Lincoln - The opportunity to grow medicine in cornfields may have slipped away from Nebraska and Iowa farmers for at least the time being.

The biopharming movement - the attempt to put genes into plants that will reproduce into therapeutic drugs - continues to advance, but companies are shying away from corn as a potential drug-making factory.

"I see it as a lost opportunity," said Aurora, Neb., farmer Richard Schaffert, who was among the Midlands farmers in 2002 who planted test plots of corn for a biopharming company called ProdiGene Inc. of College Station, Texas.

The crops-to-drugs industry suffered a major setback when gene-altered corn plants from the previous year's ProdiGene tests emerged among soybeans growing in the same fields.

That'll do 'er!