‘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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
When patents on Terminator seeds first came to light nine years ago, even the most jaded among us were stunned by the audacious corporate greed manifested by this novel (and complex) gene engineering technique. Terminator refers to crops that are genetically modified to render sterile seeds at harvest – the equivalent of a “biological patent” […]
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…
Further reflections on EPO’s May 3 decision to revoke Monsanto’s species-wide soybean patent ETC Group has been receiving lots of emails and phone calls in the past few days about the defeat of Monsanto’s soybean patent one week ago. While most have been congratulatory a few have asked whether this wasn’t in fact a hollow victory […]
The biotech industry claims that the global area devoted to GM crops in 2005 was 90 million hectares - or 222 million acres. ETC Group does not endorse or agree with the validity of annual statistics on GM crops compiled by the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA).
We agree with civil society critics who charge that ISAAA’s statistics are inflated and unreliable. However, even using industry-generated statistics, the biotech countdown is revealing. Here are the “vital statistics”:
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 […]
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’ -
By Silvia Ribeiro
This article provides more information about the infamous case of two new experimental drugs derived from transgenic rice by Ventria Biosciences, tested without consent, on babies and children hospitalized at two pediatric institutes in Peru. The rice was genetically engineered with synthetic human genes to produce artificial human milk proteins. (Only spanish).
Fabrizio y […]
(et cet er a) and other things; such as human rights, biodiversity, biopiracy, converging technologies, global governance and corporate concentration. An experimental growing plot for news, views and new ideas.
