Date: Fri, 14 Mar 1997 14:23:25 -0500 (EST) From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena) Subject: M-I: Re: A Fear of the Future Shawn Wilbur is right: >Let's not pretend that the folks attempting to gain the intellectual >property rights to soybeans, of tailoring those beans to the pesticides >they sell, are champions of the Enlightenment. And, further, I would agree that there exists: >[A] very rational -- and very marxian -- concern about these technologies >as they have actually been shaped by capitalism. I did not intend in my original post to cast aspersions on Professor Hubbard, who -- like her colleagues R.C. Lewontin, Dick Levins, Steffie Woolhandler, and numerous others grouped around the old Science for the People Collective -- has proven to be both a practical and dedicated enemy of the ravages of capitalist science. My purpose was simply to note the tone of defeatism and despair that pervades so much of science writing on the Left today, and to contrast it with the optimism and forward thinking that one used to routinely encounter in the work of, say, J.D. Bernal or J.B.S. Haldane. I, along with many others, are saddened by this turn of events and by the wider pattern of melancholy within Marxist thought of which it is such a conspicuous part Having said that, I can only nod in assent with James Farmelant's general observations on what he aptly terms the "pessimism" of the Left. This morning, Reuter's carried a report on some sizable demonstrations in Norway against the import of genetically altered potatoes. The demands carried with it a call for the outright *banning* of not only Germany's Qiagen and France's Genset (two of the largest biotech companies in the country), but of domestic research into *all* agronomic genetics, as well. Several well-known left parties were significantly represented at these demonstrations. Now, I am all for standing foursquare against venture capitalists and the ruin they visit rather promiscuously on public and private research alike. And they *are* reaching gigantic proportions: in 1996, the ten largest European biotech firms raised more than $8 *billion* in outside capital, as compared to less than $4 billion the previous year (*Bioworld Financial Watch*, February 3, 1997). This has the potential for another exponential increase after the second quarter of 1997 when the results of several important large-scale clinical trials in new genetically engineered medicines are scheduled to be made public. Too, with the establishment of the London-based European Medicines Evaluation Agency (through which new drugs can be simultaneously approved across all European Union member-states), everything can be pushed thorugh in six months or less, thus overwhelming the ability of citizens groups and peoples' lobbies to monitor potential hazards. But, surely, the Left is at a level of sophistication sufficient to separate the wheat from the chaff in this regard. In order to provide adequately for the mass socialist civilization of the future, humanity will need at the very least to exponentially increase its resources in food, medicine, energy, building materials -- goods and services of virtually every kind -- to meet the challenges ahead. Success in that worthy endeavor will surely depend much on what we do in these new areas of science today. Louis Godena NB to Stephen: According to the *Boston Globe* (February 26th), Flynn (an astute urban politician but a deeply ignorant man) trotted out all the old science-fiction fantasies of armies of cloned Hitlers, parent-offspring twins, and legions of Alduous Huxley's proletarian slaves> --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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