ETC Blog

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’ [...]

Read the rest of this entry

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…

Read the rest of this entry

Last week the US Justice Department (DOJ) gave the green light for Monsanto’s $1.5 billion takeover of the world’s largest cotton seed company, Delta & Pine Land (D&PL) — the company that has long vowed to commercialize Terminator seeds (more on that below). The so-called “anti-trust” regulators approved the deal with a number of conditions. [...]

Read the rest of this entry

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 [...]

Read the rest of this entry

In a couple of days Hope Shand from ETC Group will be in court in the European patent Office to challenge Monsanto’s Patent on Soy beans – a patent that we have been contesting for 13 years and that originally Monsanto themselves opposed!! You can read more about that here. In the meantime, ETC Group [...]

Read the rest of this entry

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”:

Read the rest of this entry

In this article the author makes a very enlightening summary of corporate concentration during 2006, and how this affects our lives as simple citizens even though we think it’s something happening far away… by Silvia Ribeiro Corporate concentration through global mergers and acquisitions reached a record at the close of 2006. In our daily life [...]

Read the rest of this entry

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 [...]

Read the rest of this entry

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.

Read the rest of this entry

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.”

Read the rest of this entry