Comments: Biohacking one's way out

Apropos biohacking, not everybody is deathly afraid of going after the genome with an disassembler, if a hacked banana is improving your harvest an order of a magnitude, resistans will crumble if it ever existed.
See this article as an example
http://www.techcentralstation.com/010504E.html

Posted by henrik ohrstrom at January 6, 2004 05:28 PM

Practical benefits will win out when there is no conflict with worldviews. Most developing countries do not have any particular problem with biotech - except a lot of pressuring from western groups who have a deep worldview problem with biotech. Europe does not need GMO desperately or to get ahead in international competition, so we can afford to be picky about things. And an organisation based around certain values will of course profit when it can promote these values (making people at home pay it) regardless of the long term effects abroad. So the net result is that the philosophical objections of the west, based in the green-romantic view of nature, are exported or used as a trade weapon, limiting the use elsewhere.


Posted by Anders at January 6, 2004 09:38 PM