Biotechnology: Corporate Power Versus the Public Interest

Frankenfoods, designer babies, Dolly the Sheep and Raelian fantasists: few subjects generate as much controversy and misinformation as biotechnology. This book takes the reader behind the headlines to examine the new laws on genetic-based technologies, who's making them, and why. Steven P. McGiffen offers a lucid analysis of the real implications of biotechnology legislation in the US and the EU, and contrasts it with approaches to agricultural and medical biotech in the rest of the world. He argues that the EU and America are removing decision-making power from the people and their elected representatives. Biotechnology regulation is a local manifestation of a global process of transferring power: from the people to corporations, from poor countries to rich ones, from the public to the private. He shows that biotechnology demands effective and democratic international decision-making procedures -- and that we are very far from achieving them. Ideal for the general reader, this is an indispensable guide for activists and anyone who wants to know more about how to control biotech regulation and how to resist handing control of our future to corporations.