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Rice students hope BioBeer can fight disease
HOUSTON -- Forget dashing to Spec's for a six-pack. Head instead to a science lab at Rice University.
On second thought, maybe you shouldn't. The brew in the second-floor lab in Keck Hall isn't exactly ready for prime time.
Unless, that is, you're interested in bits of DNA, genetic sequencing and scientific breakthroughs, with the ultimate goal of creating a beer that might fight cancer, heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.
It started, as so many great ideas do, as a joke.
"But then we found that we'd be able to do it," said Thomas Segall-Shapiro, 20, a junior biochemistry and bioengineering major at Rice. "That's when we got sold on the idea."
BioBeer — a more consumer-friendly name than the original Frankenbeer moniker — will be brewed using yeast genetically modified to produce resveratrol.
Resveratrol, a naturally occurring compound found in red wine and a few other foods, has been shown to have cancer-fighting and cardiovascular benefits, at least in mice.
"We're all about spreading the health," joked Rice junior Taylor Stevenson, another member of the team.
The students will take their preliminary work to Cambridge, Mass., this weekend for the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition, where student scientists from around the world showcase new ideas created from interchangeable parts of DNA.
They don't have drinkable beer yet, although Joff Silberg, assistant professor of biochemistry and cell biology and one of the group's faculty advisers, said they should by the end of the semester.
Not that they'll be tippling, of course.
Only one member of the team, senior Sarah Duke, is old enough to legally drink.
Everyone, however, understands that the idea of brewing a healthy beer has drawn attention to what nonscientists might otherwise see as an impossibly wonky endeavor.
The idea surfaced as students relaxed after last year's competition. (Rice's entry, which didn't win, was a bacterial virus that fought antibiotic resistance.)
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