"Deadly Monopolies": How firms are Taking Over Life Itself

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"Deadly Monopolies": Medical Ethicist Harriet Washington on How Firms are Taking Over Life Itself

(Democracy Now!)

(Guest: Harriet Washington, medical ethicist and author. Her new book is called Deadly Monopolies: The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself—And the Consequences for Your Health and Our Medical Future. She is also author of Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present.)


AMY GOODMAN: One of the major themes that’s been raised in the Occupy movements across the country and the world is the increasing power of large corporations over more and more aspects of our lives. Well, today we’re going to look at the issue of the corporate control of life itself.

Our guest, medical ethicist Harriet Washington. She has just published a book that examines the extent to which what she calls the medical-industrial complex has come to control human life. In the past 30 years, more than 40,000 patents have been granted on genes alone. More patents are pending. Washington argues that the biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies patenting these genes are more concerned with profit than with the health or medical needs of patients.

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AMY GOODMAN: Why did you take on this book?

HARRIET WASHINGTON: I was really disturbed not only by the displacement of the traditional, more altruistic values of medical research, but also by the lack of transparency with which corporations have managed to co-opt not only research itself, but also the generation of new cures and the pricing of drugs.


http://www.democracynow.org/2011/10/31/deadly_monopolies_medical_ethicist_harriet_washington

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1. Patent your own DNA with a Creative Commons no-commercial-use license.