Book dossier

The human body shop

by Andrew Kimbrell

The exploits of the new engineers and profiteers of life read more like science fiction than science fact. But fact they are, and frighteningly so. The human body and the other organisms of the earth are rapidly becoming the raw material for a new industrial age - a manufacturing revolution based on the manipulation and marketing of life. The escalating price placed on our most intimate possessions - our blood, organs, cells, and genes - along with the increasing ability of biotechnologies to alter the human body, has created a boom market for the human body shop. Using controversial case studies, Andrew Kimbrell exposes an industry based on the cloning of life forms, fetal tissue transplants, genetic engineering, and a host of startling new discoveries and techniques.^ With recombinant DNA technology it is now possible to transplant, snip, insert, recombine, rearrange, edit, program, and produce genetic and other living material just as our ancestors were able to heat, burn, melt, and solder together various inert materials. Scientists are, in fact, creating new combinations of animate matter just as the machine makers of the past century created new shapes, combinations, and forms of inanimate matter. Whether in the areas of human health and childbearing or in the manipulation of viruses and other microbes, these advances, though extraordinary accomplishments, actually represent a remarkable and insidious invasion of the sanctity of life by the same engineering and marketing imperatives that dictated the direction of the Industrial Age.^ This extension of the ideologies of efficiency and the market to what is now being called the Age of Biotechnology is among the most disturbing technological, philosophical, and ethical transitions in recorded history. The Human Body Shop lifts the cloak of secrecy and confusion that has long concealed the astounding and shocking experiments involving the manipulation, engineering, and marketing of life forms. Explaining the new techniques in genetic engineering and identifying who is conducting the research and who stands to profit from it, Kimbrell outlines ethical and moral limits to the uses of biotechnology - limits that directly challenge the ideologies of efficiency and the market currently dominating and determining the present course of science and technology.