The ultimate hostile takeover:
Patenting life

by Mike Quinn

There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to 
adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. We can shape your 
vision to anything our imagination can conceive. We will control all that 
you see and hear. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which 
reaches from the deepest inner mind to the outer limits (the opening 
from TV's Outer Limits).

Recently, the European Patent Office (EPO) received an application that is 
the first of its kind. The application is for the patenting of women. No, 
you don't have to read the sentence over. That's what it says — patenting 
women.

But these are not ordinary women, or at least not the sort of women we've 
been familiar with thus far. These are women who will have been genetically 
engineered.

They would be genetically altered — perhaps at the embryo stage, perhaps 
later — so that their mammary glands would produce valuable human 
proteins.

The patent was jointly filed by the Baylor College of Medicine and Grenada 
Biosciences of Texas, and was careful to encompass all female mammals — 
including humans — under its coverage.

What this patent application symbolises, in one fell swoop, is the far-
reaching horror of a relatively new, giant biotechnology industry, 
controlled by a few transnational corporations and governments that are 
doing nothing less than positioning themselves for a very real takeover and 
dismemberment of the world as we know it, both in its natural and societal 
formations.

Armed with a new science, the corporations will also own the internal 
organs, brain, limbs, protein, and most importantly, all their sources — 
the genes.

The Human Genome Project is a $3 billion US government-sponsored program 
whose aim is to decode or "map" the approximately 100,000 genes of the 
human body.

Jeremy Rifkin, President of the Foundation on Economic Trends in 
Washington, says in his book, The Biotech Century, "It's likely that 
within less than ten years, all one hundred thousand or so genes that 
comprise the genetic legacy of our species will be patented, making them 
the exclusive intellectual property of global pharmaceutical, chemical, 
agribusiness, and biotech companies."

Quoted in the book, The Case Against the Global Economy, Derek Wood, 
head of the biotechnology patent office in London, puts his finger rather 
squarely on the threat when he says, "This is clearly an area that is going 
to prove a pretty horrendous problem in the future.

"The difficulty is in deciding where to draw the line between [patenting] 
genetic material and human beings per se."

A frightening initiative happening concurrently, begun in 1990, is called 
the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP).

Scientists from North America and Europe are being metamorphosed into gene 
hunters whose goal is to collect DNA samples from hundreds of indigenous 
peoples around the globe.

Leaders in both the religious and indigenous communities have condemned it. 
Methodist Bishop Kenneth Carder called the effort to colonise the genes of 
indigenous people "genetic slavery ...

"Instead of whole persons being marched in shackles to the market block, 
human cell-lines and gene sequences are labelled, patented and sold to the 
highest bidders."

New science, new warfare 

Make no mistake about it, if US history has taught us anything, it is that 
the hidden goals behind the corporate/state projects are as top secret as 
the Manhattan Project, which created the first US nuclear bombs, killing 
hundreds of thousands of civilians in Japan.

Millions more poor people have died slow deaths as a result of US nuclear 
blackmail and the US-based corporate domination of their countries, which 
go hand-in-hand.

It is precisely this history that points to the underlying reason the US 
Government (read Pentagon) is so intricately involved with the corporations 
and university-based institutions in developing the new science of 
biotechnology. It is part of their ferocious, unending quest for ultimate 
weapons of mass destruction.

Biological weapons, of course, have already been used for some time by the 
US military in warfare — in the Persian Gulf, Vietnam, Cuba, and also in 
experiments on the US population and other people. But more deadly, 
effective and cheaper biotechnology agents are within reach.

Rifkin points out, "Scientists say they may be able to clone selective 
toxins to eliminate specific racial or ethnic groups whose genotypical 
makeup predisposes them to certain disease patterns.

"Genetic engineering can also be used to destroy specific strains or 
species of agricultural plants or domestic animals, if the intent is to 
cripple the economy of a country." 

The destructive power of biotech weapons are projected to be, more or less, 
equivalent to the destructive power of nuclear weapons. The defining moment 
of the 20th century was the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

For the first time in history, humanity saw that the US Government would 
have the capacity to actually annihilate our species.

With the startling development of biotechnology, the peoples of the 21st 
century are beginning to confront the fact that there is now a second way 
for our species to disappear. 

The emotional hook: medicine 

The public face of nuclear technology was not about death and destruction, 
although the US created a cold war to fuel the technology; it was about the 
peaceful uses of nuclear power.

Along with nuclear energy, nuclear medicine gave nuclear technology public 
legitimacy.

In a type of deja vu, the public is being sold on the new science of 
biotechnology as the final answer in medical care. The promise of this new 
science is to cure and prevent practically every disease known to 
humankind.

That is the largely emotional hook that the state, along with the corporate 
media, is using to win over the people. 

Nature vs nurture: the false dichotomy 

Since when does nutrition, or the general environment (i.e. corporate 
toxins and pollution), have nothing to do with disease? Why are we now, all 
of a sudden, being told that all disease basically boils down to the genes?

If Karl Marx taught us anything, it was the science of dialectics. There is 
no more of a dichotomy between nature and nurture than there is between the 
Pentagon and war-making, two sides of the same coin.

Marx showed how nature and the environment (society, culture, economic 
systems) go hand-in-hand in the creation of the human being in society — 
physically, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually. But that's not 
the philosophical bill of goods being sold now by the state.

For example, 30 years worth of research on the link between electrical 
power stations and leukemia, especially in children, has just been flushed 
down the proverbial toilet. Why? Because the state (in the US) claims that 
one biologist falsified one study (which he denies).

Not to worry. The state has proclaimed that from now on there is no 
environmental link. Kaput. Alas, it must be in the genes!

I guess it's now just a coincidence that so many children with "leukemia 
genes" happen to live near electrical power plants. (Well, by golly, I must 
have been born with the "dumb gene".) 

The legal system has, for the most part, been able to de-link the 
environment from human disease. This has paved the way for the brave new 
world of biotechnology with genes at its core (i.e. the biological nature 
of disease).

Again, it is through the patent courts, with full government backing, and 
in the name of helping humanity, that the ultimate corporate takeover of 
life has begun.

Resisting the new genetic world order 

While the genetic manipulation of human beings is still at an early, 
limited stage, the genetic modification (GM) of food is well under way. 
Most of us are already eating GM food without knowing it.

What has taken billions of years of evolution to produce is now being 
dismantled in a matter of decades. Biotech giants like Monsanto, DuPont, 
Novartis, Upjohn, Eli Lily, Rohm and Haas, and Dow Chemical will be 
releasing tens of thousands of GM bacteria, microbes, crops, insects, 
animals and fish, into the environment.

Absolutely no one knows the long-term effect. We are part of the single, 
most extensive experiment ever done on living things.

In the final analysis, the pursuit of science must be divorced from 
corporate profits, which can only happen under a socialist state.

In this sense, all struggles against racism, for the rights of working 
people, for the environment and for socialism are connected to this war to 
save the natural, living world.

The fightback in Europe, especially England and in underdeveloped countries 
like India, is well under way.

As more and more people in the USA become informed, it will grow there, 
too. There is a window of opportunity to stop this before it spirals out of 
control.

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People's Weekly World, paper of Communist Party, USA