June-July 97

THE HUMAN BODY SHOP

Andrew Kimbrell, Director for the Center for Technology Assessment, has worked for many years with Jeremy Rifkin at the Foundation for Economic Trends in Washington and most recently is the author of The Human Body Shop: The Engineering and Marketing of Life.

We are constantly being convinced that a bewildering array of new technologies is progress--that what can be done should be done. Few are against the X-ray, but nuclear technology didn't just end with the X-ray. It ended with a potential holocaust to the entire world. Chemical technology may have been fine for the first few chemicals, but now that we have global warming, ozone depletion, toxic waste dumps around the world, the risks threaten the survival of the planet.

We never took a single vote on any of these technologies. They change our lives, yet we do not have any control over them. These enormous decisions are made by a handful of bureaucrats, scientists, and corporations. Whether we are going to have jobs tomorrow, the kind of air our kids are breathing, what's in the food they are eating, how they are being educated, where our tax money goes-are controlled by an infrastructure of centralized technologies that have us at their mercy. We have been disempowered by a totalitarian technology system in our country run by the Corporate State.

America is not the land of opportunity that Bill Clinton talks about. It is the land of insecurity and fear. Think of the millions taking drugs just to get through the day and just to sleep at night because the rhythms of our lives are so alienated, spiritually and physically. That machine-like pace and efficiency does not comport with the human psyche, the human spirit, and the human body. Think about the millions of children that are being given drugs like Ritalin to get them through the industrialized school system.

Some technologies are very beneficial, for instance, blood transfusions. But once you are able to do blood transfusions, blood becomes a commodity. Should blood be treated like any other commodity in the market place? What about reproductive technology? Can a woman's womb be rented like any other space? California is the center of surrogate motherhood in this country. The California Supreme Court is the only supreme court in the country that has said yes, when the surrogate mother is genetic stranger to a child, she is a human incubator that can sell her body. Under the uniform commercial code she has to actually hand over that baby as if it were a computer.

Children themselves have become a commodity. A poll in Newsweek reported that 11% of Americans would abort a child who was predisposed to obesity; about 1% would abort a child because of its gender. Here is the child as a commodity, a new commercial eugenics where you can walk into a clinic and be told through genetic analysis the gender of your child, whether it is predisposed to obesity, a certain hair color, skin color, eye shape. Genentech Corporation, Eli Lilly, and other corporations are making hundreds of millions of dollars on something called a human growth hormone. Tens of thousands of parents are everyday injecting genetically engineered human growth hormones into their normal children who simply are short. Genentech has said if you are in the bottom 5% of height for your age group, you are sick--you have the illness of shortness. Our national institutes of health, our tax dollars, are involved. They have a program that takes normal kids, injects them with this human growth hormone--with a statistical link to leukemia and other medical problems--just to see if it works so that Genentech can get approval to use it.

What we are seeing is an extremely disturbing trend of discrimination, not just changing shortness and body size, but skin color, eye shape, hair color. When fertility companies talk about cloning the perfect child, they are not talking about Martin Luther King or Mahatma Ghandi. They are talking about the blue-eyed model we see in TV shows. We used to think that the solution to end discrimination was to educate the purveyors of prejudice, to say the diversity of human form and shape is beautiful, not something that should be destroyed. But the new solution to discrimination is not education of those who discriminate, but genetically altering the bodies of those who are facing discrimination. If you are short, let's not celebrate that particular form of diversity. Let's change you genetically. Let's engineer the offending trait out of that particular individual with drugs or through genetic surgery. What about transplanting organs? Can you sell organs like cars or computers? The World Health Organization has called the sale of organs an international emergency. We have organ bazaars throughout the Third World. Germany had to pass a law forbidding the sale of organs because so many people in Eastern Europe became economically disenfranchised with the collapse in Russia that they were selling their organs to people in West Germany. These are live donors, people selling their kidneys, their eyes, to those who can afford the price.

Some donors are dead, but their heart is still beating. That becomes the difficulty. We used to think we knew what it meant to be dead. Your heart stopped and you stopped breathing. Twenty years ago, a presidential commission recommended a new definition of death having to do with "whole brain-death," meaning basically they can keep you functioning with blood going through your system, so your organs are still harvestable. Lots of questions have arisen from this. Now, through the extension of many of these technologies to keep people on life-support systems, we are not quite sure when death occurs. Ethically and legally we are in a potential free fall.

In this country the vast majority of organs come from those who are brain-dead. Although we have stories from the press about people who donate to a relative or a child, there is a distinction between selling and giving. No wealthy person ever says, "I want to sell my eye." If we talk about selling, the poor becomes a breeding class for organs for those who can pay the price. The same is true with fetal tissue. One reason we were able to get a bill passed in Congress forbidding the sale of fetal tissue was that poor women were attempting to abort so the fetal tissue could be bought for research and experimentation.

We are treating ourselves just as we treated livestock--as machines in production based on efficiency. We are looking at the invasion of the market, the invasion of engineering principles, through the body itself, though the sale of our organs, the sale of our blood, the engineering of our genes, the engineering of women's bodies to be reproductive machines for those who can afford the price. I call it "gee whiz" medicine. You can get on all the major networks if you take a baboon heart and put it into a baby, but not if you talk about nutrition programs, health promotion, disease prevention. Many of the reasons we need transplants are because of our unhealthy lifestyle, stress, alcoholism, poor diet. The ultimate solutions to these problems cannot be capital intensive, needing lots of money and plug-in organs-- an elite pursuit of privilege. At best, it is a small therapeutic solution for a very few people.

Nuclear technology was not limited to beneficial aims. The petro-chemical revolution in our century was not limited to beneficial aims. Now genetic engineering is being used in this horrific manner to prescreen who is going to be born and not be born, based on physical characteristics having nothing to do with disease. This technology is already being used in pernicious ways. Insurance companies and employers want genetic information so they can discriminate against those who might be a risk. Who is going to have access to that information? Employees? Insurance companies? The government? We are talking about genetic discrimination--that means all of us because each and every one of us has some so-called genetic weakness. The Department of Defense is now taking DNA identification through blood and cheek cells of every member of the armed forces. Within a couple of years they will have 10 million samples. They are going to keep it for 75 years. Ultimately, we can see an infrastructure developing.
The Clinton administration has accepted gleefully every new advance in genetic engineering. I am talking about adding human genes into animals, animal genes into plants. This stuff is hitting the supermarket. You have genetically engineered foods in your supermarket today that have foreign genes from a variety of other species in them. In 1992 the Bush administration decided that they were not going to require the labeling of genetically engineered foods. In 1993 the Clinton administration said they were going to reconsider. But the official policy remains--no labeling of goods.

We are taking genes--the building blocks of life--and creating new living things. Human genes can be put into a mouse, a pig. Over 36 human genes have been put into other animals. Our tax dollars are paying Dr. Verne Pursel up in Maryland to take human genes to create a super pig. I saw this pathetic pig--cross-eyed, bow-legged, couldn't reproduce-a tragi-comic caricature of what he is trying to create. The idea is, if you take the human growth gene and put it into the pig, you are going to have a huge pig. Imagine if we took an elephant growth gene, put it into an early stage human embryo, and imagine that huge growth spurt altering the physiology of the human fetus because we want bigger and bigger people. Well, that is exactly what we are doing with these pigs, sheep, mice, etc.

What researchers are not telling us is that they need to patent the research animals that are genetically engineered. They put human and other genes into these animals so they are predisposed to get cancer. Harvard got the patent which they assigned to DuPont Corporation. The mouse is a research tool programmed to get breast cancer so they can do research on the mouse. It's been around about 10 years but to my knowledge we have made almost no progress in cancer research based on animal experimentation. The progress that has been made is in early detection and prevention. Billions of animals, including the genetically engineered ones--all that animal suffering-has come to almost nothing.

Dr. Malcolm Martin at the National Institute of Health wanted to have mice altered so they could get AIDS. Mice don't get AIDS, don't get the HIV virus, but he wanted a tool for research for AIDS. Sounds good, right? He took the HIV virus and made it a genetic component of mice in every cell of their bodies. Front page news! I sued him. What if these mice get free? We are going to have a non-human repository of AIDS out there. They gave in to the lawsuit, but then Science magazine publishes a study that in this mouse the AIDS virus had melded with other retro-viruses in mice to create a new more virulent HIV. There was potential that this new virus could be communicated by air. All those mice to my knowledge have been destroyed, but that's just to my knowledge.

Genetic engineering represents one of the most extraordinary breaking of all species' limits. We can now mix and match the genes of virtually any creature at will in the lab. All these creatures are going out into the environment. They are exotics, new plants and animals. It is ecological roulette, and every one is a potential disaster. Congress has not passed a single law limiting genetic engineering or trying to handle its environmental impacts. Just think how many new creatures we have brought over to the U.S. Most of them have been safe, but there was chestnut blight, Dutch elm disease. The new paradigm that we are going to have to face in the 21st century is biological pollution. We all know chemical pollution, the oil spill which dilutes over time, something you can control generally over time, but biological pollution--living organisms being put out into the environment--can't be recalled. You can't put a net over them and say, "This is where this toxic dump is." Those creatures go out, they disseminate, they reproduce, they mutate. We are taking tens of thousands of novel plants and animals and putting them into the environment with no understanding of how they are going to affect the environment.

The patenting of life was a 5 to 4 Supreme Court decision in 1980--one of the least discussed and most important decisions of the century. They decided General Electric could patent an oil-eating microbe that it had produced. Then without any vote in Congress, much less a referendum of the people--because Congress doesn't represent the people--the administration in 1985 said you can patent plants. In 1987 you can patent animals, human genes, human tissues, and human embryos. Cloning and patenting are the complete control of life by corporations. If you are a research company and you have genetically engineered an animal or a plant, you want to patent it. You want to own it so no one else can use it. You want a monopoly. And you need to clone it-you can't have natural reproduction that lets in genes other than the ones you want in your perfect "master race" of plants and animals.

What can be done?

Write to the FDA and say, "I insist that genetically engineered food be labeled. I need to know." We are going to force them to label this food. If we have it labeled, then we can organize people not to buy it. And they know that.

Fight for your local area to be a Genetic-engineered Free Zone. Pass city ordinances, stop them at the food level. People do not want to cede control anymore; the mild conveniences offered are not worth the price of giving up our sovereignty. We want to change corporation charters to make them responsible to their communities. We want to topple these totalitarian technologies which control so much of our lives.

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