Rumen-Nations

From the very dawn of civilized life, hunger has haunted humankind. The transition from hunting and gathering to settled farming implied heightened vulnerability to famine, from both natural and human-made causes. Over the millennia, advances in agriculture have permitted higher levels of production, but the hungry have remained with us. The Green Revolution, which started in the wealthy countries at the beginning of the 20^th century and arrived in the developing world in the 1960s, was the latest agricultural advance to increase world food supply, but today there are more hungry people in the world than at any time in our history.

The Golden Rice project was a new stepping stone, with a different approach to helping the hungry poor. Seeing that higher food production does not necessarily alleviate hunger, a Swiss-German team of scientists created a variety of genetically-engineered rice that bore the gene to produce vitamin A. This meant that even people who, due to extreme poverty, had to eat a meager and unvaried diet of rice would be able to obtain sufficient amounts of vitamin A from their food, hence resolving a major nutrient deficiency without any radical upheavals in society. Since then, other scientists have worked in the same line of “biofortification”, enriching staple crops, naturally lacking in vitamins or protein, with new genes that will permit them to provide a more complete food source for people. We are at the verge of a great breakthrough: poor people in Africa or Asia may soon be able to eat nothing but rice, or millet, or corn, and nevertheless achieve a balanced nutritional intake.

The only problem is quantity. Even if the Indonesian family that eats little other than rice can now obtain a full suite of vitamins, minerals, and proteins from their staple food, if they cannot produce or buy a certain minimum quantity of rice every day, they will be malnourished, consuming an insufficient amount of daily calories.

This is where my colleagues and I at the Ruman Institute took up the problem. While the Green Revolution increased production of food, and the new Gene Revolution will gradually improve nutritional quality of many foodstuffs, the fact remains that the poorest of the poor simply cannot access sufficient food, no matter how abundant and nutritionally-balanced that food is. What are we to do for these people?

Our proposal provides a novel and pluridisciplinary answer. We take inspiration from the Gene Revolution and the Transhumanist movement, as well as the latest advances in the field of cellulosic biofuels. Our goal: to equip needy human beings with rumens. A rumen is the multi-chambered stomach common to the class of animals known as ruminants: cows, goats, sheep. It is what allows these animals to digest and thus benefit nutritionally from such things as grass, straw, and even paper and sawdust. Ruminants can convert into useful calories the cellulose and fiber which would pass rapidly and uselessly through the digestive tract of most animals. From time immemorial, humankind has harnessed these ruminant animals to convert grass and kitchen scraps, which we can't eat, into meat and milk, which we can. But for every 10 calories of grass eaten by a ruminant animal, only 1 calorie reaches us in the form of meat. By cutting the animal “middleman” out of the process and allowing humans to directly eat grass and other cellulose-rich foods, we are realizing an exponential gain in efficiency. Most importantly, we are helping those poor who have long been denied access to the world's food, by opening up an entire planet's worth of nutritious grass and even paper waste for their nutritional benefit!

The process of integrating rumens in human beings must of course be a gradual one. Our science is simply not yet up to the challenge of merging organs from lifeforms so divergent as humans and ruminants. So we have designed a three-part research and development program to achieve the eventual goal of inserting genes in people that will allow them to form a cellulose-digesting rumen as part of their normal anatomy.

• Step 1: No-waste nutrition education

• Step 2: Rumen transplants

• Step 3: Definitive integration of the rumen-forming genetic code into human beings

What follows is a brief explanation of each step.

Step 1: No-waste nutrition education

In the United States and in the world, almost as much food is wasted as is consumed. Food is lost to rot, to insect attacks in storage, to expiration dates in supermarkets, and with the final consumer when he or she throws away part of a meal. This is ridiculous when we consider the number of people who go without food. The logical conclusion is to join both ends of the problem to create a solution. If the hungry poor can take advantage of thrown-away food, we can make a serious dent in world hunger. This involves two major components. First off, the poor have to be reeducated to get over an indoctrinated aversion to food waste. With the exception of food damaged by mold or bacteria, most thrown-away food is perfectly edible and nutritious. The second component is to engineer efficient channels such that disposed-of food reaches needy people. In many developed countries there already exist channels for day-old bread, soon-to-expire grocery produce, etc. to reach soup kitchens. It would be very easy to integrate the organic waste stream into such channels. In the developing world, where there is the most need, these channels are unfortunately not as developed. In addition, most hungry people in the developing world live in the countryside, where it is hard to reach them. Despite these obstacles, we are already seeing promising results in our programs to channel waste disposal from large Third World cities so that thrown-away food reaches the neediest areas.

Step 2: Rumen transplants

Obviously step 1 is a stopgap measure, to be carried out as we advance on the ultimate project: integrating rumen-based digestive systems into the human body. Step 2 is the first major step toward the final goal. We are currently at work designing the logistical and medical procedures for implanting a rumen into the human digestive tract. We have two work models. One is based on actual llama rumens. Llamas are the all-stars of ruminants, because their three-chamber rumens can digest rough scrub and the nutrient-poor plants found in the arid high plains of their native Andean habitat. They are even more efficient cellulose-processors than goats or cattle. However, because llamas are so different anatomically from humans, it is a great medical engineering challenge to perform direct implants. The second line we work on involves an artificial, silicone-based rumen, modeled after the llama rumen but with some important modifications. The engineering issues associated with this synthetic rumen are less daunting, but we have not been able to attain the throughput efficiency of the natural llama rumen. Nevertheless, work continues on both fronts, and we hope to be ready for our first functional transplant in early 2013. We are currently in talks with the government of United Arab Emirates to line up potential recipients for our first transplants.

Step 3: Genetic engineering of “Rumans”, human beings with naturally-formed rumens

This is our final goal, and is understandably some years in the future. Step 2 involves a relatively expensive surgery to endow disadvantaged human beings with a functioning rumen. It raises a financial question: perhaps the money spent on a transplant would be better spent on direct economic help for the individuals chosen to benefit from the procedure? Obviously scaling up the effort to provide implanted rumens to all chronically hungry people on the planet would be a very costly undertaking. That's why the eventual goal is to insert genetic code into needy people such that they, and more importantly their future children, can form their own rumen naturally and free of charge. Though it sounds easy enough, it is actually a formidable undertaking. Most genetic engineering until now has affected one or two genes that produce a given protein in the body. What we are proposing is to enable the production of an entire organ, which involves inserting hundreds of genes. On top of this, the discrepancy in the genetic codes of humans vs. llamas is immense; we must overcome all manner of natural hurdles to the process.

When we started our work at the Ruman Institute, many thought that our aspirations belonged to the realm of science fiction as opposed to real science. With our diligent work and rational, gradual program, we are proving the critics wrong. Some may feel that the costs for such a project are unreasonably high, or that there could be more effective social as opposed to technological fixes for world hunger. But when technology gives us the possibility of ending hunger without disturbing the social order, what cost is too high? What solution can be better than cutting-edge technology?