by Stefano Vaj
[295] Gregory Stock, Redesigning Humans, op. cit., p. X
[296] The recent article with the unbelievable title “Does Race Exist?” by Barnshad and Olson in Scientific American, December 2003, re-echoes the terms of the problem of a “race-conscious” medicine.
[297] Guillaume Faye, Archeofuturism, op. cit.
[298] Jeremy Rifkin, The Biotech Century, op. cit.
[299] In particular, they first used a “restriction enzyme” to extrapolate the DNA molecule from an organism. After the DNA has divided, one separates out a small segment of genetic material, a single gene or a sequence of adjacent genes. Then one cuts a segment of the body of a plasmid, which is a small fragment of bacterial DNA. Both the original segment and the plasmid segment present the ability to “bind” at the extremity and the plasmid thus modified is used as vector to transport the DNA into a host cell, which set out to duplicate it, generating a cell with the same modified DNA.
[300] Ritchie Calder, “Retailing the Tailor,” in Encyclopedia Britannica, London 1976.
[301] One of the most curious and fascinating aspects of genetic transplants is how the same gene can conserve a similar expression not only outside of the species, family or genus it belongs to, but even across phyla, or from animal realm to vegetal realm and vice-versa.
[302] The method speculated about in a movie like Jurassic Park (USA, 1993) – as remarkable for its special effects as it is permeated by the curse that the religion of the director since always adopts against this kind of temptations (cf. the legend of Golem) – is that of extracting of a segment of DNA from the blood of a dinosaur found in the sting or the digestive tract of prehistoric insects trapped in vegetal amber, and then grafting them into the blastula of ostrich eggs.
[303] As we shall see, this “explosion” is anything but widespread and symmetric, and its geography reflects worrying general trends, among which, for instance, the fact that while European drug companies have hardly doubled their own budget in the “research and development” field from 1990 to 2000, American companies quadrupled theirs, so as to achieve, at the beginning of this century, 24 billion dollars, so that today out of the ten most sold drugs eight are American. But there is more. In 1990 the European groups in the sector spent 73% of their research allocations in Europe, ten years later this had gone down to 59%, with again the United States as the primary beneficiary of such transformations of the investments (see on this matter David W. Versailles, Valérie Merindol, Patrice Cardot, La Recherche et la Technologie. Enjeux de Puissance, Economica, Paris 2003). Such a situation generates even more of a lag specifically in the “cutting-edge technologies” such as biotechnology, than, say, in the field of “me-too-drugs” based on variants of known molecules.
[304] See O’ Toole, “In the Lab: Bugs to Grow Wheat, Eat Metal,” in Washington Post, 18/01/1980, p. A1.
[305] Jeremy Rifkin, The Biotech Century, op. cit., p. 16. Many of the examples mentioned herein are taken from this book.
[306] Robert J Frederick, Margaret Egan, “Environmentally Compatible Applications of Biotechnology. Using Living Organisms to Minimize Harmful Human Impact on the Environment,” in Bioscience, spring 1994, p. 531.
[307] It has been calculated that already in 1996 the United States alone generated 200 million tons of dangerous garbage, and the planet spent 1700 billion dollars to dispose of toxic substances. This gives an idea of the strategic importance of this issue, examined for example by Parkin, “Bioremediation. A promising technology” in Frederick B. Rudolph, Larry V. McIntyre, Biotechnology, Science, Engineering and Ethical Challenges for the Twenty-First Century, Joseph Henry Press, Washington D.C. 1996.
[308] Cf. Gabriele Marcotti, “A Harvest of Heavy Metal,” in Financial Times, 08/05/1998, p. 16.
[309] Michael Fumento, Bioevolution. How Biotechnology Is Changing the World, op. cit., p. 313.
[310] Rifkin, The Biotech Century, p. 17-18. Last figure quoted in Enzo Caprioli, “Cibo geneticamente modificato or scontro tra civiltà?,” op. cit.
[311] Ibidem, p. 18.
[312] Lawrence Busch et al., Plants, Power and Profit. Social, Economical and Ethical Consequences of the New Biotechnologies, Basil Blackwell, Cambridge, MA, 1991, p. 173.
[313] “Tricking Cotton to Think Lab is Home, Sweet Home,” Washington Post, 29th May 1988, p. A3.
[314] Martin H. Rogof, Stephen I. Rawlins, „Food Security. A Technological Alternative,” in Bioscience, May 1994, pp. 800-807.
[315] For a summary of the scientific and political debate on this topic, see Zuccato and Fanelle, “Processo ai cibi OGM” in Le Scienze, no.425, January 2004, p. 56.
[316] Cf. Giovanni Monastra, Maschera e volto degli OGM, op. cit. Effectively “nature,” irrespective of its status as “mother and mistress,” and in particular the vegetal realm, as such offers a very wide range of poisons, allergy-inducing substances, substances that warp human metabolism, lead to addiction, alter perception, and provoke well documented pathologies.
[317] The hysteria that this rare and slowly progressing pathology has incited is not independent of the symbolic perception of a “sacrilege” that would have been committed when feeding cattle with animal proteins – as if in nature cows fed on fodder or hay! While the origin of the prion responsible for the disease is still poorly understood, it should be remarked that exactly as human beings are able to digest bread – even though the wheat grains are not strictly speaking naturally edible or part of the natural diet of the species – so herbivores too are physiologically and metabolically able to feed on meat, and sometimes do in extreme conditions, which can even include resorting to cannibalism. Cf. the behaviour of Australian sheep in time of prolonged drought.
[318] It should however be conceded that genetic modification of cultivated varieties, even though today it is only oriented to profit, does not solely aim at higher yields per hectare or at organoleptic characteristics (that is palatability for consumers), but also to enrich them and raise their content of nutritional factors, or to eliminate harmful or toxic compounds they might contain. In this sense, genetic engineering tries to “repair” in some way the harms brought by the modified diet following the abandonment of the “paleo diet” of the hunting-and-gathering culture in favour of food rich in calories, in particular in complex carbohydrates, but poor in micronutrients and protein.
[319] See the campaign against “Frankenfoods” by the powerful Union of Concerned Scientists, an association in reality counting rather few scientists amongst its members, who are almost exclusively ecologist militants and members of the “bioethics” movement.
[320] In Julianne Johnston, “FDA Official: Biotech Foods Safer than Hybridisation,” in AGB News, 13/10/2000.
[321] Enzo Caprioli, “Cibo geneticamente modificato: innovazione scientifica o scontro tra civilta`,” op. cit.
[322] Michael Fumento, Bioevolution. How Biotechnology Is Changing the World, op. cit., p. 200, http://www.dupont.com
[323] As Giovanni Monastra says, in the above quoted article, to flog his leftwing “co-religionists,” in his opinion not sufficiently ready to denounce such practices when they take place in countries that are not yet completely dominated by global capitalism.
[324] It will at the most be necessary, and sufficient, to repress the relative commercial frauds, as well as ensuring that the economical subjects involved and the consumers of the final product be exhaustively informed.
[325] “Rightwing” Italian opposition to GMOs is at once demagogical and connected to deep-rooted ideological prejudice. In this sense, as in the above-mentioned pamphlet by Giovanni Monastra, it entirely avoids the fundamental long-term problem that arises in this respect, and sticks to particular immediate interests, obvious of course, but that cannot find any definitive solution inside this perspective. This attitude echoes that of someone who, legitimately refusing the bureaucratic, mercantilist and impotent European Union, which is furthermore deprived of any popular legitimacy, in favour of the constitution of
a sovereign political entity in the strong sense of the term, would be content with resisting any further transfer of sovereignty from old national States for as long as he could. Monastra, a former member of the techno-scientific commission on GMOs of the Ministry of Agricultural and Forest Politics, makes himself the openly-biased mouthpiece of various propaganda arguments stemming from here and there, without bothering much about their scope and consistency: “a GMO variant has harmed a few butterflies;” “GMOs don’t work, and therefore science, wrong and reductionist at its core, impedes the genuine modification of living organisms;” “GMOs are controlled by multinationals because they cannot reproduce, and in addition they are anyhow biologically unstable,” but at the same time “they threaten to escape from the cage and take control of the planet;” “tests on GMOs should be made tougher,” but “research on GMO should be avoided, because it is dangerous in itself, and one can in any case say nothing about the their safety;” “GMOs are nutritionally impoverished,” but “those like the Golden Rice that are instead deliberately enriched to this effect are useless for the health of the population that uses them to remedy to nutritional deficiencies,” and “they correspond to the creation of a ‘false need’.” In fact, in this last respect, the true “scientific level” of this discourse, beyond the accumulation of more or less “brilliantly illustrated” technical details for the layman, is exemplified by the author’s remark, himself a research biologist, according to which “soya has a high protein value which, although it does not reach that of animal proteins in eggs and meat, can become equivalent, if accompanied by cereals like pasta, bread and rice.” (!) Indeed it is a tenet of “alchemic wisdom,” which is evidently not foreign to the author, that the amount of gold contained in a given mixture might increase out of its association to another compound that itself contains no gold.
[326] This argument is echoed, albeit marginally, in Gianantonio Valli’s “Le radici ideologiche dell’invasione,” L’Uomo libero, no. 52, namely in the chapter on “La distruzione sociale e alimentare del Terzo Mondo”.
[327] Rifkin, The Biotech Century, p. 114.
[328] Moreover the issue does not per se extend to plant varieties that for long have been the object of IP protection also in Italy, by means of a sui generis patent certificate.
[329] The possibility itself of genetic engineering, and also of traditional hybridisation, selection, etc., technologies, is conditioned by the availability of genetic materials on which to work, which is… reduced by that very tendency to monoculture it helped to develop. The importance of protecting biodiversity is therefore evident, not only in order to ensure its permanence by means of seed banks, etc., but also in order to protect that which is a specific resource of the community that controls the territory in question from being taken over by others, in the same way as one protects a hydroelectric plant or an oil field or a gold mine. It is not by chance that in some equatorial countries, which are richest in wild genetic material, there is today a rising political, economic and cultural awareness on this subject.
[330] Eloquent in the sense is David W. Versailles, Valérie Merindol, Patrice Cardot,’s La Recherche et la Technologie, Enjeux et Puissance, op. cit. The study shows the progressive, gradual evolution and integration, from the point of view of a political community survival and independence, of the concept of Defence into that of Security, where the traditionally military aspect is taken in a context where in practical terms the difference between a epidemic and a bacteriological attack, between a military reprisal and an act of terrorism, an embargo and a techno-economical strangulation effectuated with commercial means, between a bombardment and a natural catastrophe risk, become increasingly elusive.
[331] Michael Fumento, Bioevolution. How Biotechnology is Changing the World, op. cit., p. 284.
[332] Hence the majority of ecological disasters that took place in the past, and that can obviously also happen in the future, has nothing to do with a human intervention of any kind. Leaving out spontaneous climatic change and geological catastrophes, the penetration for instance of foreign species in new habitats is a phenomenon that can happen spontaneously in nature, and that has sometimes had explosive and devastating consequences on the pre-existent ecosystem, in spite of any implicit assumptions to the contrary by “ecological irenism”.
[333] Philip Ball, “Living Factories,” in New Scientist, 03/02/1996, pp. 28-31.
[334] US Department of Defence, „Biological Defence Program,” in Report to the Committee of Appropriation, House of Representative, 1986, also mentioned by Jeremy Rifkin, op. cit.
[335] Deposition by Douglas Feith to the Subcommittee on Oversight and Evaluation of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, August 1986. Whoever is opposed to GMOs because “they don’t work” ought naturally to be worried… Quoted by Jeremy Rifkin, The Biotech Century, op. cit., pp. 92-93.
[336] Reported by Jeremy Rifkin, Declaration of a Heretic, Routledge & Kegan, Boston 1985, p. 58.
[337] Reported by Rifkin, The Biotech Century, op. cit., p. 94.
[338] The statement is recorded by Horlock, “The New Terror Fear. Biological Weapons, Detecting an Attack is Only The First Problem,” in US News and World Report, 12/05/1997, p. 36.
[339] James Dickey, “His Secret Weapon. Iraq: Saddam Has a Big Germ-Warfare Arsenal,” in Newsweek, 04/09/1995, p. 34.
[340] The never clarified “anthrax-letter” affair firstly sent to the American Senate might plausibly appear as a chapter of this very saga in the post-9/11 climate and in the fierce competition that ensued to grab the ample budget allocated to “security against terrorism,” apart from possibly avoiding the formation of an inquiring commission into the “aerial attacks”. Already at the time of the Reagan administration, however, in order to confront an imaginary “bacteriological gap” with the then Soviet Union, the Department of Defence had managed to make the Congress raise the investment allocated to biological warfare from $15 million in 1981 to $90 million in 1987 (in the currency of the time).
[341] Leonard A. Cole, “The Specter of Biological Weapons,” in Scientific American, December 1996, p. 92.
[342] Ed. Bruce Alberts, William A. Wulf, Making the Nation Safer: the Role of Science and Technology in Countering Terrorism, National Academy Press 2002.
[343] In July 2002, for example, Edward Wimmer of New York University announced that he had recreated in the laboratory the poliovirus using DNA bases and a map found on the Internet (cf. J. Cello, A.V. Paul and E. Wimmer in Science no. 207, 2002, p. 1016). Of course today most people are vaccinated, but as Martin Rees point out in Our Final Century. Will The Human Race Survive The 21st Century? op. cit. it would not be harder to create a variant both infectious and lethal.
[344] Such a theory, that has been variously attributed to American conspiracy nuts, and to the Disinformation Office of the KGB, did in its time become quite widespread, and was echoed in the second half of the eighties, although in doubtful terms, by Eléments, the most “engagé” and “politicised” review of the French Nouvelle Droite. For all we know it might still be true. Certainly the security measures at the time were not impressive, and moreover AIDS, in spite of its high risk and social costs, has shown itself to be a wonderful tool of social control for the American ruling class, both on internal minorities as on the populations of developing countries.
[345] An alternative, that is valid only for microbes, is the so-called “anti-bacteriological warfare,” that is, the development of pathogens that specifically attack organisms carrying the epidemics, and in particular the so-called “bacteriophage” viruses, that are currently the object of research with wider, e.g., medical or agricultural, goals. Cf. Paroma Basu, “The new Phage” in Technology Review, 17th July 2001. The conclusions relating to the have and have-nots of the technologies in question in any case do not change.
[346] Jeremy Rifkin, The Biotech Century, op. cit., p. 19.
[347] From Christopher Helman, „Charlotte’s Goat,” in Forbe
s, 19/02/2001.
[348] This happy news was announced by among others Luca Sciortino in “Il primo animale transgenico di compagnia,” Le Scienze, January 2004, no. 425, p. 24. But more recently it would appear that similar experiments in Taiwan have lead to the creation of… fluorescent pigs, that one reasons might prove useful for the study of various diseases given how easy it will be to single out material coming from such pigs, precisely because they glow, without any invasive examination. See Lester Haines, “Boffins breed fluorescent pig” in The Register, 12th February 2006.
[349] Ann Thayer, “Firms Boost Prospects for Transgenic Drugs,” Chemical and Engineering News, 26/98/1996, p. 23; Johannes, “Biotech Cow Is Created to Produce Drug,” Wall Street Journal, 09/04/1997, p. B1.
[350] Martha Groves, “Transgenic Livestock May Become Biotech’s Cash Cow,” Los Angeles Times, 01/05/1997, p. A12.
[351] Smith et al., “How Genetics May Multiply the Bounty of the Sea,” Business Week, 15/12/1985 p. 94.
[352] For an overview, albeit nearly two decades old, see Holmes, “Blue Revolutionaries,” New Scientist, December 1996, p. 82.
[353] Example quoted in Rick Weiss, „Mutant Bugs: Genetically Altered Heroes or Spineless Menaces?”Washington Post, 18/12/1995, p. A3.
[354] Oddly, Dolly’s creator, Ian Wilmut, is a fierce opponent to human cloning, and even more to genetic engineering, which his own work has much contributed to develop. Cf. Gregory Stock, Redesigning Humans, op. cit., p. 6.
[355] The first announcement of the birth of a human clone was circulated at the end of 2002 by Clonaid, a group close to the Raelian sect, but its credibility was questioned when the sect decided not to give experts access to Eve, the child allegedly cloned from its mother (see “Clonazione: abbandona il ‘garante’ dei raeliani,” Corriere della Sera, 7th January 2003). Later declarations made by less colourful characters followed, such as that by the Kentucky-based geneticist Panos Zavos, who claimed he had implanted, into a thirty-five year old woman, a clone made from skin cells of her sterile husband (“Annuncio choc: impiantato un embrione clonato,” Corriere della sera 17th January 2004).