The Sunshine Project
News Release
23 October 2003
Ricin breeding and production projects
at Texas Tech University raise questions
(Austin and Hamburg) – Since the mid-1990s, researchers at Texas Tech University (TTU) in Lubbock have conducted several projects to produce ricin, a toxin found in the seeds of the castor bean plant. Ricin is deadly in very small quantities and is subject to tight restrictions under both the Chemical and the Biological Weapons Conventions. At TTU, agriculture researchers bred castor to create high-ricin yielding plants specifically adapted for toxin production. TTU chemical engineers also built a machine to extract the highly potent toxin. The peaceful biomedical demand for ricin is extremely limited, and TTU’s efforts far outstrip it in many aspects. TTU's public explanation of all its ricin projects is required. The activities are of particular concern because of TTU's quiet but intense involvement in Pentagon biodefense programs.
The Breeding Project: TTU's castor breeding project, which began in 1995, has two aims - producing a variety of castor with low ricin content, and one with high content. A low ricin variety, called "TTU-LRC", is the one that the University likes to talk about. But the project also aimed to create a castor variety specifically adapted for ricin production, with the characteristics of being machine-harvestable, having high toxin content, and a low level of Ricinus communis agglutinin (RCA). RCA is a product of the seed that is harmful; but that is difficult to separate from ricin. By breeding for lowered RCA and the other characteristics, TTU sought a new variety of castor fine-tuned for manufacturing ricin.
The Ricin Extraction Unit: Parallel to the castor breeding effort, beginning in 1996, TTU's chemical engineering department designed and built a machine to automate the process of extracting purified ricin from seeds grown on the university's 2 acre (.81 hectare) experimental castor plot. According to recent statements by TTU, this machine ran test batches of 'denatured' castor beans that did not contain ricin; but was never used to actually produce toxin. Like the castor breeding, the construction of this machine has been justified by TTU with the explanation that ricin might be used in pharmaceutical products. Yet there are no approved pharmaceutical uses of the toxin. Medical experiments have utilized very small quantities of ricin for years; but no viable products have resulted. And biomedical researchers are able to produce the tiny quantities of ricin that they need on-site - without a castor field, without a ricin 'extraction unit', and without any need to produce, store, and ship large quantities of toxin.
Scale and Purpose: In many countries, castor is grown for its oil, which has many uses. In commercial castor production, ricin is a dangerous nuisance, and it is systematically eliminated from the oil and byproducts. TTU efforts work in the opposite direction - they relate to producing the toxin at a scale for which there is absolutely no legitimate use. A small plot of many existing types of castor will produce many times more toxin than is needed for legitimate biomedical purposes. With TTU's ricin extraction technology, even its small test plot is capable of producing enormous amounts of toxin. With normal harvests and farming practices, TTU's two acre (.81 hectare) plot, sown with an average ricin-level variety, can yield in excess of 150 kilograms of toxin if it is efficiently extracted. By way of comparison, the international terrorism scare prompted by last year's discovery of ricin in Europe was provoked by a few grams of the substance.
GMOs with Ricin: TTU scientists also developed ways to move the genetic code for ricin from the castor bean into other plants, such as cotton. Comparatively little is publicly available about this research although a notice on TTU's website indicates that TTU has developed transgenic ricin technology that is for sale. According to the notice, ricin production can be limited to parts of the plant that are not typically harvested. In this particular area, TTU's work follows that of others - University of Florida researchers produced ricin in tobacco as early as 1994, and have followed with work to produce ricin in laboratory cell cultures.
Conclusion: The effort at TTU to develop ways to produce and use ricin involved a coordinated effort across several academic departments and activities that, if conducted in many countries, the US would consider proof of a weapons program. While TTU is not the only university to experiment with transgenic ricin, the creation, much less release, of genetically-modified ricin-producing species is an extraordinarily bad idea. Either through accidents or abuse, such plants could result in widespread problems from ricin toxin. TTU's work to breed a ricin production variety of castor is completely unwarranted. Selection for ricin production characteristics should never have been performed, and the germplasm should not be released. TTU's construction of a ricin extraction unit in the absence of any legitimate demand for the weapons agent product was sheer folly.
Because TTU ricin activities relate to production of a toxin subject to severe restrictions under the Chemical and Biological Weapons Conventions, TTU should provide a detailed public explanation of all of its ricin projects. Ricin production has little to no reasonable peaceful application, but it could be appropriated for military purposes. So, TTU should wish to avoid suspicion by clarifying that its ricin production projects have no relationship to any Army, Air Force, or other Pentagon biodefense research that is being conducted at the University. TTU's explanation should account for all the castor and any toxin that TTU has produced and fully describe the present status of all TTU ricin-related projects, including any at its Health Science Center or other affiliated environmental and health institutions. It should fully explain TTU's motives in the ricin work and every application to which the knowledge, plants, equipment, and toxin that it has produced have been applied.