Saturday, June 23, 2007
The Science of Taking Life Industry
The connection between current "life science" corporations and warfare should be fairly well known, DuPont, Dow, Monsanto - now major companies involved in seed production and agri-chemicals. Well, that history isn't over. According to a recent editorial, the work of many "life science" companies in the arena of biowarfare research isn't being made public, despite legal requirements for NIH funded research.Some of the companies in question: Abbott Laboratories, BASF Plant Science, Bristol-Myers Squibb, DuPont Central Research and Development, Eli Lilly Corp., Embrex, GlaxoSmithKline, Hoffman-LaRoche, Merck & Co., Monsanto, Pfizer Inc., Schering-Plough Research Institute, and Syngenta Corp. of Switzerland.
Quoting Sunshine Project reports and University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign international law scholar Francis Boyle, the editorial drops the following info:
- The Bush Administration has called for $44 billion for biowarfare research, apparently this is more than in any other time in history
- Only 8,500 (16%) of the 52,000 workers at the top 20 US biotech firms work as NIH guidelines-compliant facilities
- the Pentagon's Chemical and Biological Defense Program has been revised (as of 2003) to include offensive strikes
- the NIH received $1.76 billion for biodefense (mostly for anthrax research), while it only received $120 million to combat influenza, which kills around 36,000 US citizens annually.
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