Sunday, February 27, 2005
UN bans reproductive cloning
target=_blank>The legal committee of the United Nations' General
Assembly voted on Friday (February 18) by a slim majority in favor of a
non–legally binding agreement that asks member states to prohibit
reproductive cloning and adopt legislation to respect "human dignity"
and "human life." But the text, which one diplomat said was
intentionally ambiguous, does not define when life begins.
Thursday, February 24, 2005
German Genome Project helps create online 'Bioethics' game
from: href="http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/004639.php"target=_blank>We Make Money Not Art
href="http://www.bioethik-diskurs.de/genethix_e/genethix.html"
target=_blank>Link to "gen.ethix" game (requires flash player)
Monday, February 21, 2005
U.S. Denies Patent for a Too-Human Hybrid
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19781-2005Feb12.html" target=_blank>Paradoxically, the rejection was a
victory of sorts for the inventor, Stuart Newman of New York Medical
College in Valhalla, N.Y. An opponent of patents on living things, he
had no intention of making the creatures. His goal was to set a legal
precedent that would keep others from profiting from any similar
"inventions."
Sunday, February 20, 2005
Monsanto buys cotton seed corp Emergent
href="http://www.fool.com/News/mft/2005/mft05021810.htm?ref=foolwatch"target=_blank>from Motley Fool
The search for the"fat gene" goes global...
From the SF Chroniclehref="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/02/20/ING31BD37J1.DTL" target=_blank>Hunt for the 'thrifty
gene' leads to South Seas island
War of the clones
target=_blank>In the same week that a leading pet cloning companyannounced the sale of another cloned cat and dropped its price for the
service by more than a third, animal activists stepped up efforts to
ban or regulate the practice.
Americans support appropriate use of reproductive genetic testing
A majorityof Americans believes it is appropriate to use reproductive genetic
testing to avoid having a child with a life-threatening disease, or to
test embryos to see if they will be a good match to provide cells to
help a sick sibling, a new report of the Genetics and Public Policy
Center reveals. However, most Americans believe it would be wrong to
use genetic testing to select the sex or other non-health related,
genetic characteristics of a child.
Panel to Advise Testing Babies for 29 Diseases
From the NY Times: href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/21/health/21baby.html?
ex=1266642000&en=7e4533b605363cc6&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland"
target=_blank>An influential federal advisory group plans to recommend
in the next few weeks that all newborns be screened for 29 rare medical
conditions, from the well known, like sickle cell anemia, to diseases
so obscure that they are known to just a handful of medical specialists
and a few dozen devastated families.
Monday, February 14, 2005
New Agent Orange suits threaten Monsanto
target=_blank>An article from an August NYT discusses a new lawsuitbrought by US and Vietnamese families against chemical companies,
including Monsanto, who produced Agent Orange.
Saturday, February 12, 2005
link between biodefense program and pharmaceuticals
href="http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/micro_stories.pl?ACCT=913120&TICK=GPHA&STORY=/www/story/02-08-2005/
0002987118&EDATE=Feb+8,+2005" target=_blank>The Generic Pharmaceutical
Association (GPhA) today issued a strong warning to the Senate that
biodefense legislation (S. 3) in its current form would effectively
extend patents for marketed drugs and delay access to more affordable
generic medicines-unnecessarily increasing prescription drug costs to
consumers, businesses, and government purchasers by tens of billions of
dollars a year.
Monday, February 07, 2005
YOUgenics3.0 panel discussion
"Rounding Up the Unusual Suspects: Art in the Age of Biotechnology andthe Patriot Act"
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Thursday, February 17, 6:00 p.m.
School auditorium
280 S. Columbus Drive
(free admission)
Panelists include:
Lori Andrews, Distinguished Professor of Law at Chicago-Kent College of
Law and Director of the Institute for Science, Law and Technology and
author of Future Perfect: Confronting Decisions About Genetics;
Dr. Tod Chambers, Associate Professor of Bioethics and Medical
Humanities and of Medicine at Northwestern University 's Feinberg
School of Medicine and author of The Fiction of Bioethics (Routledge);
Ryan Griffis (moderator), curator of the Betty Rymer Gallery exhibition
"YOUgenics";
Terri Kapsalis, author of Public Privates: Performing Gynecology from
Both Ends of the Speculum (Duke University Press), founding member of
Theater Oobleck and a longstanding educator at a women's health
collective in Chicago;
Faith Wilding, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of
Performance at SAIC and founding member of the performance collective
subRosa.
Canadian Government to Unleash Terminator Bombshell at UN Meeting
target=_blank>A confidential document leaked today to ETC Group revealsthat the Canadian government, at a United Nations meeting in Bangkok
(Feb 7-11), will attempt to overturn an international moratorium on
genetic seed sterilisation technology (known universally as
Terminator). Even worse, the Canadian government has instructed its
negotiators to "block consensus" on any other option.
Saturday, February 05, 2005
GM Cotton Fiascos Around the World
This is an excellentin-depth report by the Institute of Science in Society that examines
problems with GE around the world. Including: Indonesia (where many
farmers burned their cotton in protest against the government and
Monsanto); China (where a researcher reports that the technology will
not only be useless within six to seven years, but "could cause a
disaster"); and the U.S. (in Southern Arkansas, despite the use of
supplementary pesticides, 7.5% of the GE crop was destroyed by
bollworm, the very pest it was supposed to kill). from href="http://www.nwrage.org" target=_blank>NWRAGE
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