What is the secret of Senomyx?
Movie buffs old enough will find that question eerily reminiscent of the teaser from the 1973 dystopian sci-fi thriller, Soylent Green. That film was set in 2022, but here it is 2010 and we already discover that the horrible secret of Soylent Green is an ingredient in new “flavor technologies” manufactured by the company Senomyx:
The company is Senomyx, and I’ll let them tell you in their own words what they do: “Senomyx is discovering and developing innovative flavor ingredients for the food, beverage, and ingredient supply industries using our unique proprietary technologies,” which will “enable our collaborators to achieve a competitive advantage and/or improve the nutritional profile of their products while maintaining or enhancing taste.”
And what are their “unique proprietary technologies”? When I started poking around, I kept running into the same phrase on numerous sites: “Embryonic kidney cells from aborted human fetuses.” (Thanks for that to Robert Cohen of www.notmilk.com.) So I did some investigating of my own, and that led me to The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which very helpfully has posted five studies done by Senomyx, in which I was able to read quite clearly, in the second article listed, that the technology did indeed come from human embryonic kidney cells. (Although you might want to look quickly, before they mysteriously disappear. Just saying.)
As Cohen has noted on his site, Senomyx has succeeded in genetically engineering taste bud receptor cell triggers. And the company itself notes on their website that their technology uses “isolated human taste receptors.” But what does that mean for us, aside from the repulsive origins of their technology? It means we’ll never again know exactly what we’re eating. [Read more.]
You thought MSG was bad? You were right. But Senomyx… is people!
