ETC Blog

‘The cool’ and ‘the concerned’ – that was how Zurich-based ethicist Nicola Biller Andorno today aptly characterised the two tribes attending Synthetic Biology 3.0…The cool, in her lexicon, are the synthusiasts, those who regard making synthetic life forms as…like…hey dude, that’s like, so cool. The concerned, roughly speaking, is made up of people like us [...]

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Sunday afternoon and Synthetic Biology 3.0 gets underway in high spirits amidst the glass and concrete of the ETH Campus. Host Sven Panke kicked off the conference promising that SynBio3.0 would have something for everyone — the enthusiasts (clearly the majority), the curious and the skeptics (we guess that’s us). This was clearly the day [...]

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Some of us from ETC are in Zurich for the next few days observing what happens when you cram several hundred synthetic biologists and industrialists into a conference room — the evolution of a new industrial species? These ‘Synthusiasts’ are now into their third annual international congress, Synthetic Biology 3.0, each conference named like a [...]

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Is Craig Venter, the so called “bad boy of biology”, about to announce the world’s first synthetic lifeform? (or ‘Syn’ for short)… we don’t know. According to New Scientist “rumours are circulating that his institute will soon unveil the first synthetic bacterium”. What we do know is that he has applied for a patent with broad claims that include a synthetic organism itself…

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As well as dealing with Monsanto in Munich this week, ETC Group has also been raising the alarm about a massive geo-engineering experiment scheduled for this month around Galapagos by Planktos Inc. Here is an open reply to a public attack on our press release.

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On October 10, ETC Group attended the US Food and Drug Administration’s first public meeting on nanotechnology. About 40 people had signed up to make presentations, and we were each given eight minutes to say our piece to the FDA’s newly-formed Nanotechnology Task Force. (You can read the text of ETC Group’s presentation here.) It [...]

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Nano-Drug’s Dirty Little Secret ETC Group’s September 2006 report on nanomedicine, Nanotech Rx, requires some updating. After all, it’s nearly 30 days old. Our report mentions the nano-drug Abraxane, and it acknowledges that approval of the cancer drug was a watershed event for the nanotech industry. But important details are emerging. On October 1 the [...]

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The Economist this week has a Special Report on Synthetic Biology , the new field of building artificial life forms from scratch. As is to be expected from the Economist, this is a fairly upbeat assesment of the technology that fails to mention the growing opposition to Synthetic Biology, signalled a few months ago when almost forty civil society groups, trade unions and scientific associations signed an open letter calling for caution.

Here at ETC we have been busy writing our own special report on Synthetic Biology (which we are calling ‘Extreme Genetic Engineering’ – watch this space!). You can expect it to be a bit more critical than the Economist.

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Silvia Ribeiro* The biotech company Ventria Biosciences sponsored tests, on babies and children hospitalized at two pediatric institutes in Peru, of two new experimental drugs derived from transgenic rice that was genetically engineered with synthetic human genes to produce artificial human milk proteins. The experiments – results of which were revealed this May in the [...]

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While some ETC Group staff were in Caracas strategizing with partners to strengthen the global opposition to Terminator, others of us were subjected to the slog of the CBD meeting in Granada. And one of us was spending a few days with unlimited access to free chocolate at Swiss Re’s opulent Centre for Global Dialogue near Zurich. Swiss Re, the world’s largest re-insurer (an insurer of insurance companies) is concerned – no surprise – about those risks associated with nanotechnology that may result in financial losses for the company.

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