Review by Hope Shand, research director of ETC Group.
In October 1996, a spokesman for Monsanto told Farm Journal why his company was buying up seed companies left and right: “What you’re seeing is not just a consolidation of seed companies, it’s really a consolidation of the entire food chain.”
Today, Monsanto is the world’s largest seed […]
“I think this is going to become the foundational technology of the 21st century” - that was the triumphant message with which Tom Knight of MIT brought Synthetic Biology 3.0 to an end today. An engineering generalist who moved from artificial intelligence to artificial life, it was Knight who, along with Drew Endy, developed […]
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 […]
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 […]
Ventria, a California biotech company, is growing rice that is genetically engineered to produce two pharmaceutical compounds derived from human genes. It was revealed in May that the company had tested its controversial “pharmed” compounds on 140 patients at a pediatric hospital in Peru. The article below by Silvia Ribeiro appeared in the July 1 edition of Mexico’s “La Jornada.”
A group of approximately 40 women from the Via Campesina movement - mostly from across the Americas - staged a dignified protest against Terminator on the floor of the negotiations at COP 8 today. They received applause from delegates and the Chair of the meeting recognized their protest and remarked that it was “a heartfelt […]
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.
Some of us at ETC have just spent the past three days in a drafting group for the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation’s inspiring What Next? project. Hopefully we will write more about What Next? as it gets closer to completion. Briefly the What Next? project its an attempt to stop, reflect and look forward to the […]
(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.
