Biopirates and the poor.

• Author: Shiva, Vandana
• Position: Brief Article

The promise to cure disease through human genetic engineering has moved faster on Wall Street and in the media than in basic scientific knowledge of how genes work and how genetic manipulation affects whole organisms as well as their relationships with other organisms. Within a few weeks the "alphabet" of the "Book of Life" shrank from 100,000 to 30,000; this is just one indicator of the ocean of ignorance in which the island of human genetic engineering is floating.

The three major concerns arising from human genetic engineering are biopiracy, the transformation of socially defined traits into biologically defined ones, and the issue of privacy.

Across the world, indigenous communities are outraged at biopiracy of genes and genetic material. The recent case of collection of blood samples from the Naga tribe in northeast India is just another example of gene piracy at the human level. Such piracy can even happen in the heart of rich industrial society, as shown by the case in which University of California scientists patented the genes of a cancer patient, John Moore, without his knowledge.

What is called a deficiency--mental, physical, or other--is socially defined. For example, the perverse world...