ETC Blog

Jim Thomas Cuándo sus defensores hablan de la “economía verde”, gran parte de lo “verde” que tienen en mente es literalmente de color verde. Las hojas, brotes, ramas, algas, hierbas y otras materias vivientes que el planeta genera en aparente abundancia es ahora un blanco de primera línea para la explotación comercial, desde la visión [...]

Read the rest of this entry

Silvia Ribeiro A 20 años de la Conferencia de Naciones Unidas sobre Medio Ambiente y Desarrollo (Cumbre de la Tierra o Eco´92) se realizará una nueva conferencia global, en junio 2012, en Río de Janeiro, Brasil. Río+20, como se le llama, ocurrirá en medio de las mayores crisis globales del siglo: devastación ambiental y erosión [...]

Read the rest of this entry

Written for The Ecologist – February 2009 available online at http://www.theecologist.org/pages/archive_detail.asp?content_id=2053 Somebody somewhere has to have a cunning plan to fix our environmental problems and save the world – right? Jim Thomas sorts through the big tech ideas you’ll be reading about this year  Almost every day sees new technologies being proposed to fix old problems. [...]

Read the rest of this entry

Written for The Ecologist – 20/06/2008 As to global annihilation, I’m stumped. Most of us wouldn’t recognise a strangelet if it casually devoured us in the street There’s a slim chance – about one in 50 million – that nobody will ever read this article. A physics experiment taking place under the French-Swiss border could [...]

Read the rest of this entry

What do ocean-going yachts, space-traveling bacteria and synthetic life have in common? J. Craig Venter, of course. The self-styled genome tycoon has been busy pushing the boundaries on what may appear at first glance to be unrelated enterprises. Nothing could be further from the truth. A suite of recently uncovered patent applications lodged by Venter and his colleagues reveal not only an attempt to grab ownership over much of synthetic biology (see news release) but also a breathtakingly bold business plan for producing millions of new synthetic organisms per day. At the heart of this are plans for a new, automated process enabling rapid assembly of complete synthetic genomes – plans that, if realised, could render current genetic engineering techniques quaint and obsolete. Venter calls it “homologous in vitro recombination” or “combinatorial genomics.” ETC suggests it might be properly dubbed “shotgun synthesis” and it has the potential to blast apart current biotech practice.

Read the rest of this entry

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 [...]

Read the rest of this entry

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.

Read the rest of this entry

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 [...]

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