Posted on 11/20/2004 9:21:32 AM PST by NormsRevenge
Sacramento biotech company Ventria Bioscience is moving its headquarters and controversial field trials of genetically engineered plants to Missouri. Officials at Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville said the move could help turn the school into a center for plant-made pharmaceutical production.
Ventria has been looking to move for months, partly because of the hostile reception and regulatory hurdles it faced earlier this year in California when it tried to expand field trials of rice that contains common human proteins.
"We looked at several companies and decided that Ventria was a perfect fit to be our anchor company," university President Dean Hubbard said in a statement.
Ventria, started by a biologist from University of California, Davis, in 1993, has 12 employees.
CEO Scott Deeter said Friday that the company is preparing to ramp up production of plant-made pharmaceuticals next spring in Missouri, although moving the office and laboratory could take more than a year. The main plants used by the company are rice and barley.
Deeter said he doesn't anticipate planting more crops in California, where Ven tria's plans for pharmaceutical rice became a flashpoint in a statewide debate about genetically engineered crops. "We really needed to get to a location where we can commercialize," Deeter said.
(Excerpt) Read more at sacbee.com ...
I'm tellin' ya, if RINOld had the sense God gave a jackass, he'd foster a proposition to eliminate the CA state income tax! Until then, businesses will continue the exodus...
Score one more for the Red States!
We soaked up two years trying to get a small roofing plant built in Stockton. After the California air board, the city board, neighborhood board worked us over for various shakedown fees, we built the plant in Reno.
What I find odd is that all the liberal California types throw a hissy fit when genetic research is done on corn, but they want the gubmint to fund GM people.
You see, Davis is the place where you can't have a gun store, you can't smoke on a public sidewalk, and they built a $1,000,000 tunnel under the highway.
For frogs. Yes. The tunnel was built for the exclusive use by frogs trying (or not trying) to get across Highway 80.
In Davis, if you anything other than pure research on the public dole, you are a lower life form, and if you don't like highly organic food, you are to be tolerated. But barely.
PS - I'm at UC Davis grad, and I work in biotech.
Today over 70% of the food in the US is GM.
He might have that much common sense: what CA needs is economic shock therapy, and business exodus will eventually provide it. The snapping (or "tipping over", in WOT parlance) point might not have been reached yet.
I just can't believe all the hysteria that the topic generates among the libs. Do you ever have any freaks out there protesting where you work?
I'm a UC San Diego grad...Revelle College in Molecular Biology. There weren't many biotech jobs in 1976, so I made a living in computer science and electrical engineering. The advent of computational biology is an intriguing cross between my original academic training and my current profession. I'm probably way too late to the table on that score.
There's a term for encouraging Jews to come to Israel, Ayalia? or something. We need to do the same for the good people trapped in blue states.
I don't think so. Bioinformatics has cooled off in the past couple of years, but it's going to heat up again in a major way.
Look into doing BLAST-type stuff, and I'll bet you could still make yourself a good deal of money.
I work at a very large biotech in South San Francisco, and some of the new hires are refugees from straight silicon, didn't want to move to India, etc. Their formal degree background DID help in making the jump.
Thanks for the pointer. I took a trip to Idaho Falls this afternoon. After a nice dinner, I visited the Barnes & Noble bookstore. They had a copy of Bioinformatics for Dummies. It's impressive to see how the computer science world has jumped into the task of handling the massive amounts of data associated with gene sequencing. When I was in school, I was doing gene and peptide sequencing with the most primitive of tools in the lab. It was so hard to get any significant volume of data that employing computers was simply unnecessary.
I noticed from the "Dummies" book that a variety of tools have been developed to manage tasks that I learned to do manually. I'll take a look at BLAST. My current work is mostly embedded systems, digital signal processing and management of the data derived from bearing signature analysis for safety and maintenance. It would be nice to recapture some value from my training as a molecular biologist.
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