Medicinal Masturbation

The demand for recombinant therapeutic proteins grows larger every year. These medicines are used for treatment of myriad disorders and conditions, including cancer, lysosomal storage diseases, and diabetes. The vast majority of therapeutic proteins are glycoproteins, meaning that they have short, distinctive carbohydrate chains attached to particular amino acids of the protein backbone. These carbohydrate chains are often required for proper function or targetting of the protein.

Many different eukaryotic hosts, including yeast, hamster and insect cell cultures, plants, chickens, and even lactating mammals have been engineered to produce therapeutic proteins at industrial scale. The issue is that while the core protein synthesis machinery is more-or-less conserved across eukaryotic kingdoms, the carbohydrate chains that are added to the proteins by the cell are highly variable. Even the glycosylation patterns of mammalian cell cultures can prove difficult to control. If the protein is produced in an intact human being, on the other hand, there is a far greater chance that the carbohydrate modification will be therapeutically acceptable.

Now we can't just go around harvesting human livers, brains, or muscles and extracting the human protein. First of all, most of those organs do not regenerate very quickly, if at all, and they're also rather vital for existence. Human placentas were, at one time, used as a source of glucocerebrosidase to treat Gaucher disease, and infant foreskins have been used in facial rejuvination creams. But both of those tissue types are hard to come by. What we want is a particularly proteinaceous secretion that is easy to come by. And there is one such secretion than is not only abundant, but enjoyable to extract!

Now the problem is that it might not be economically feasible to recover all of this baby batter if the target protein is not present in high amounts. However, those who have volunteered as donators will be infected with a retrovirus that targets the testicular tissue or the prostate gland. The gene of interest will be placed under the appropriate promoter so that the target protein is produced in high quantities. In the interest of medical ethics, only men over a threshhold age who have already procreated will be legally allowed to be transformed. After the genetic modification, the donators are paid per sample.