Biotechnology is the buzzword of major multinational corporations, including Monsanto, Merck & Co., and others. The corporate-owned media gush about the manifold commercial applications of biotech products, including transgenic pigs (who are genetically compatible with humans and are used as organ donors), crops that produce their own insecticides, Bovine Growth Hormone to boost livestock milk production, and so on.
However, when private profit is involved, you simply must raise questions, particularly in the area of biotechnology.
So, who are we to determine that they need to be "improved," when time has already shown these life forms to be evolutionary success stories? The fact that they live and thrive in the world today is proof that they are in no need of "improvement" for the sake of capitalist profit. Humans are, despite our sentience, the youngest of siblings to the other life forms on the planet.
Clearly the criterion of "improvement" in the case of biotechnology is confined to the very narrow capitalist interests at hand, who view everything as a potential commodity and judge weal and woe on an economic basis.
Thus, a big agribusiness firm may find their food crops’ vulnerability to insects a liability, and seek, through biotechnology, to "improve" them to boost their profitability. This is the nature of the "improvement" sought by biotechnology firms--increased profitability of assets, whether food crops, livestock, or basic things like bacteria and viruses.
The question you have to ask is if Monsanto’s (or any of the other big firms) definition of "improvement" necessarily gels with your own. What’s good for Monsanto’s stockholders may not be good for the rest of us, and in fact, often isn’t, as the whole Bovine Growth Hormone flap has shown.
Can the scientists-for-hire who do the gene tinkering for these firms see into the future and definitively say that no threat exists from biotechnologically-mutated life forms? They can't, of course, and they don't, if they wish to remain employed by the firm! You have the foundations for very poor decisionmaking all there, a recipe for disaster.
One need merely look at the ecological disasters wrought by the migration of species to unfamiliar habitats that accompanied human travel from continent to continent. In this case, it was only species interaction that led to the extinction of manifold species, not wholesale diddling with the very building blocks of life on this planet. When a biotechnology product gets out of hand, it will entrench itself in our world forever, with potentially (and likely, for us) disastrous consequences.
And that is yet another aspect of the arrogance of these firms--given DNA’s proven evolutionary proclivity to mutate over time, the changes they seek to make will almost certainly progress along unforeseen paths. So they make a wheat plant that produces its own insecticide--once that unnatural wheel has been set in motion, it will move along at its own pace, heedless of us. Like so much with capitalism, the long term consequences of short-term profit are disregarded.
Regardless if a biotech firm makes a lot of money on its toxic wheat, if something goes wrong with it and wipes out wheat as a food crop for subsequent generations (say by the insecticide intensifying in toxicity), there's no way you can look at it except as a bad thing for humanity as a whole.
The example that comes to mind occurred in Britain, where scientists were "confounded" by the spread of a given "improvement" they’d produced in a group of test plants to weeds that grew around the lab site. Whoopsie! How long before we really get a catastrophe on our hands?
And for what? Private gain. So a handful of stockholders can make a killing--an apt expression in this case, if there ever was one.
The idea of creating organisms for a specific purpose is similarly frightening. E. Coli remains a popular bacterium for researchers to study and "improve." It also happens to reside in our intestines, and is critical in facilitating digestion. We’ve already seen that E. Coli is able to pass on changes to other bacteria, which accounts for how some bacteria are resistant to the antibiotics we’ve produced--the E. Coli gave them "cheat sheets" if you will, which was passed into the genetic code of the nasty bacteria and to subsequent generations. The immunity of the E. Coli was transmitted to the pathogenic bacteria.
Given the continued propertarian ethos dominating our society, it is also readily apparent that military applications for biotechnology are a natural sideline for the nascent biotechnology industry. Why bother with messy bacteriological and chemical weapons of mass destruction when a custom-tailored biotechnological weapon could (at least in theory) speedily destroy a rival society? The applications of biotechnology are countless in this case, and would also be catastrophic in scope and effect.
Historically, the role of livestock in the transmission of human disease has been a pivotal one--they serve as vectors for diseases that have caused millions of humans to die. Proximity to livestock, along with concentration of populations into urban centers, is a key element in transmission of disease.
Infectious diseases are propagated by pathogens, which are carried by vectors. For example, plague is caused by a bacterium that resides inside of rodent fleas--when the bacteria flourish, they block the flea's digestive tract, which then starves the flea. What the flea does then is it tries to eat by biting its rodent host--thereby regurgitating bacteria-laden blood into the rat, thus infecting it. The rats, which lived among humans in cities, died off. But the fleas still lived, as did the plague bacterium.
The fleas also favor livestock in their effort to feed--rat fleas don't favor humans, but do like livestock--pigs, goats, sheep, cattle (excepting horses; rat fleas won't bite them). Thus, they infect and kill the livestock--once the livestock were dead, the only thing left to attack were the humans, which they did. Once the disease broke out in human society, it flourished with predictably deadly consequences.
From bacterium to flea to rat to livestock to human to human. This is a fairly typical vector-pathogen relationship. Typically, infectious pathogens don't kill the vectors (fleas) themselves--that's why they're vectors. Diseases become so deadly when they slip outside their normal ecological niche. Proximity to infected livestock and urban concentration made the Black Death (and many other epidemics) a deadly reality.
Given that such animals already pose a risk to us in this capacity without being made genetically compatible, think about what will likely happen when these transgenic pigs become more readily used--they would act as a living gateway for diseases which naturally and historically attacked only pigs.
If a pathogen confined to our porcine cousins was able to leap across the species boundary by way of this biotechnology, humanity would have no natural defense--after all, the disease in question would be accustomed to a pig's metabolism--who knows what it would do to a human one?
Living organisms, particularly lower forms like bacteria and viruses, take full advantage of any evolutionary niches created for them. Humanity would be pinning a big "kick me" sign on our own behinds!
DNA is a self-replicating chemical that, once set in motion, will continue to replicate and diversify. The state of the Earth at this time is proof of the versatility, pugnacity, and success of this molecule. All the living creatures on the Earth, in all their diversity, stem from a common ancestor--a bacterium billions of years old. Looking then at that bacterium (if we could), would a human being have possibly been able to divine the measureless diversity we see on the planet today (which, of course, is threatened by humans daily). So how can we blindly accept the words of would-be profiteers that biotechnology is safe and above all else, "under control?"
Does that mean that biotechnology is all bad? Of course not. But I strongly question whether it’s even the best method to do anything except enrich biotech firms and their stockholders.
For example, there’s been some noise about producing a biotech bacterium that would eat fat--allowing everyone those oft-advertised slim builds. So money is pouring into that area of "vital" research (no doubt in anticipation of capitalizing on Baby Boomer weight-angst)--even as the obvious alternative of exercise and proper diet is readily apparent.
The trouble is, the rest of us have to live with what these biotech firms produce. So what if the human brain is made of fatty tissue, say the PR flaks for biotechnology, there’s no way the fat-eating bacterium would be able to get into the brain, is there? And even if there was, it wouldn't be contagious--or would it?
And that’s the most troubling thing of all with this new "industry." There is precious little oversight, as the various biotech firms are all very big players, with armies of lobbyists and vast sums of cash at their disposal--they don’t worry overmuch about the government, as the largest players are multinational.
Moreover, with the emphasis on the oft-cited "bottom line," where profits take precedence over prudence, untested and dangerous biotechnological products would be rushed onto the market and widely distributed, which, if it turned out a product did prove a health risk, would have catastrophic consequences.
Monsanto's successful efforts at covering up research showing risks with BGH in its effort to secure FDA approval early (and thus get their product on the market ASAP) had predictably bad results. Companies have always shown more willingness to get a product on the market early, without sufficient testing and oversight. President Clinton has even eased restrictions on biotechnological products related to cancer and AIDS research, allowing them to be rushed to the market without FDA approval!
So, they’ve been basically allowed to write their own tickets, in the absence of any "serious" ecological catastrophes. What are they waiting for? All it really takes is one biotechnological disaster to potentially wipe out the human race. And for what? So some multimillionaire stockholder makes more money (s)he doesn't need??
We allow capitalist fools to try to profit from biotechnology at our extreme peril.