Andrew Bosworth, Ph.D. and the Biotech Empire

Listen To The Archive Here!
http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-11887/TS-202597.mp3
http://TruthBrigade.com/radio/03-16-09_AndrewBosworth_PhD-theBiotechEmpire_TS-202597-32Kb.mp3

Show Chat Log
http://TruthBrigade.com/chat/03-16-09_AndrewBosworth_PhD-theBiotechEmpire_TS-202597.htm

Andrew Bosworth, Ph.D. and the Biotech Empire

Andrew Bosworth, PhD.
B.A. University of Michigan/Ann Arbor
Ph.D. University of Washington/Seattle
www.biotechempire.com

Andrew's newly-released book, Biotech Empire: Power, Profits and the War on Your Health, is written from a constitutionalist and libertarian perspective. The book explains how the United States, which produced the Bill of Rights and landed a man on the moon, is now distinguished by mass surveillance, mass conditioning and mass incarceration. Big Business and Big Government - motivated by perpetual profits and unlimited power - are creating a high-tech Gilded Age: a "Biotech Empire."

Andrew was born in Balboa, Panama, and grew up in Washington D.C., Madrid, Paris, Rome and Tunis. After college, he taught high school in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, during the fall of the Duvalier regime. He has since lived and worked in Australia, Tucson, Dayton and Atlanta. More recently, Andrew lived in Mexico for six years, primarily in Mexico City. He also lived on the Texas-Mexico border. Currently, Andrew works with university programs in Asia and lives in Japan.

Andrew's scholarly publications include "Globalization in the Information Age," and "The Evolution of a World-City System, 3000 BC – 2000 AD." He focuses on the evolution of world trade and writing systems.

http://www.biotechempire.com/intro.htm
A revolution is underway. Meat from cloned animals, untested and unlabeled, is coming to a supermarket near you. Human DNA is being inserted into rice for human consumption. There are pigs with human blood; monkeys that glow in the dark; and mice that fear no cats. And a hybrid creature known as a chimera, a human-cow embryo, survived for a few hours in a Petri dish.

Pharmaceutical companies have invented a nasal spray that boosts sexual appetite, but it is so powerful that it may never reach the market. There are pills to stay awake (and to fall asleep); pills to concentrate at school or at work (and to zone out); and there are even pills to fight restless legs, shyness and even laziness (I mean Motivational Deficiency Disorder).

In other words, the Biotech Revolution - where biology and technology intersect - is seldom being brought to bear upon practical human problems. Although cutting-edge technology is sometimes used to restore eyesight or to perfect a surgical procedure, the dominant trend in biotech is to turn people into patients and citizens into subjects.

The United States, which produced the Bill of Rights and landed a man on the moon, is now distinguished by mass surveillance, mass conditioning and mass incarceration. Big Business and Big Government - motivated by perpetual profits and unlimited power, respectively - are creating, in effect, a high-tech Gilded Age: a "Biotech Empire."

This book's perspective is both libertarian and populist: libertarian in its distrust of government and populist in its distrust of corporate oligarchies. It holds that ordinary people, instead of being ensnared in a matrix of economic and political control, should have a say about how biotechnology affects their lives.

The writing is critical of Democrats, whose cosmetic reforms serve entrenched interests; it also savages Republicans, whose party is famous for corporate welfare, voter suppression, fear mongering, nonstop propaganda, counterfeit Christianity, and Guantanamo.

Biotech Empire may be relevant to some readers in the United States, Canada, Airstrip One (George Orwell's United Kingdom), Australia and New Zealand - societies where the Biotech Revolution most threatens to erode past achievements in human health and dignity. This family of democracies inherited the Enlightenment tradition only to witness, in the past decade, a neo-feudal rollback.

In any case, Biotech Empire confines its assumptions and conclusions to the Anglo-American world, and it does not make judgments about how non-western societies should apply technology…

Welcome, then, to an untold future of food, pills, and sex.

Welcome to a world predicted by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, where a scientific "dictatorship without tears" is founded on psychotropic drugs and biological-sexual engineering.

http://www.biotechempire.com/index.htm
Excerpts

"What would happen if scientists could clone Thomas Jefferson, who imagined a farming Utopia for America, and invite him to a 21st-century Thanksgiving dinner? Who would explain to Jefferson that the turkey was spiked with steroids, hormones and antibiotics; that the vegetables were genetically scrambled; that the dessert was laced with diarrhea-inducing fake fat; and that the rice included human genes?"

"White-smocked bio-engineers are now giving full rein to their artistic impulses, splashing genes, cells, organs and body fluids around with an exuberance not seen since Jackson Pollack flung colors on his inviting canvas."

"Inmates have become the raw material for a prison-industrial complex, shoring up perpetual profits for McJails. Corporate prisons are paid on a per-prisoner/per-day basis, and thus they lobby hard for longer mandatory sentences. Inmates also provide cheap labor, and they are about to become, once again, guinea pigs for pharmaceutical trials. All of this signals the conversion of people into valuable bio-mass."

"The Nuremburg Code should prevent scientists from permanently warehousing and classifying everyone's DNA in a genomic 'bio-bank' and then running tests with an eye towards long-range behavioral modification. But it won't…"

"By fusing plant and animal DNA, organisms acquire characteristics entirely impossible in nature - like rushing to maturity in half the normal time and acquiring bizarre characteristics… We could wait patiently for two million years and never witness natural selection yield, by chance, a strawberry resistant to frost because it somehow acquired a salmon's 'anti-freeze' gene."

"PT-141, or its active ingredient, was first tried on female lab rats in a rather intrusive manner. Researchers drilled holes directly into rat skulls in order to inject the chemical into their brains. A chemical wash sharply increased the 'solicitation behavior' of female lab rats to the extent that female rats dispensed with the flirtatious ear flipping and started 'mounting males.'"

"Ostensibly, Viagra, LibiGel and PT-141 promise individual liberation, but instead they undermine it by slowly shifting a person's sexuality to the marketplace to be bought, sold, and speculated over, just like any other commodity."

"The entire project of cosmetic surgery has been problematic since 1903, when a surgeon, Charles Miller, performed breast enlargements by opening women's chests and stuffing 'braided silk, bits of silk floss, particles of celluloid, vegetable ivory, and several other foreign materials' into the breast area. It's as if Mr. Miller opened up the breast cavity first and then ran around the room looking for filler…"

"Globalization and 'free markets' (so-called) were supposed to bring prosperity to billions of people, as promised by the World Bank and the IMF, Wall Street banks, and the US foreign policy establishment. These institutions have had almost 30 years to implement their vision and still half of humanity lives on a few dollars a day."

"In a throwback to the feudal agricultural system of the Middle Ages, Monsanto often charges farmers 'technology fees' per acre… It's high-tech serfdom, with landlords and all."

"Ilya Ivanov actually trekked to French Guinea in Africa with a team of scientists and $200,000. There, in the jungle, in makeshift conditions, he attempted to create this new Ape-Man by impregnating chimpanzees with human sperm."

"Educational institutions, ever ready to add layers of administration and bureaucracy, have found in ADHD another raison d'être. It buttresses their benevolent aristocracy."
"Will there be a more complete 'animal testing' phase of the biometric chip before it is deployed on humans? Yes, and it is called the National Animal Identification System (NAIS), a system to register and track farm animals - from farm to fork! - with an animal identification number."

Scheduled Time:

http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/11887
Date: Monday, March 16, 2009
Time: 08:00 PM EST

How to participate:

Call in:

1. Dial: (724) 444-7444
2. Enter: 11887 # (Call ID)
3. Enter: 1 # or your PIN