It's worth making the point that where fifty years ago the overwhelming majority of major American investment in science went to the computing industries (which gave rise to Silicon Valley and the obvious spin-off benefits) - today the big bucks are largely being hurled at the bio-tech companies.
The big difference between computing back then (and up to the beginning of the millennium) and bio-tech today is the issue of investor rights, patents etc. Whilst the likes of IBM, Honeywell etc. still produced plenty of proprietary hardware & software they also had the good sense to give away all manner of "open" architecture because it would be good for business in the long run (this is back when corporations operated long-term business plans as opposed to the "profit now or be damned" ethos of today). Bio-tech, on the other hand, is wrapped tighter than a ball of string with patents.
Numerous unsettling stories have emerged in places such as Mexico where uncooperative indigenous tribes have even been evicted from their lands in order for wholesale genetic harvesting to take place. And it's not just the major bio-tech corporations who are to blame. UN-affiliated NGOs ostensibly operating under the rubric of wildlife conservation have recently emerged with very dirty hands. Indeed, there was a very ugly news item that emerged a few years back out of the Lacandon Jungle (Mexico again, I think) where two major conservation groups (who stand to make a good deal of money from tie-ups with gene-tech companies) were accused of deliberately setting a forest fire in order to force people off their ancestral territories.
Much of the blame must be levelled at the Reagan administration. Under its "Great Giveaway" of state assets, money and legislature we saw General Electric brazenly claim that its newly developed "Chakrabaty microbe" (designed to devour oil despite having several less appealing appetites) should be protected under patenting laws. This opened the door to thousands of weird and wonderful new patents of everything including a human being (specifically a woman - purely for her breast milk).
Things are far worse in places such as Asia where so-called "Terminator Tech" - seed stocks which are tailored to auto-sterilise after one year have indirectly resulted in the deaths of thousands of farmers. When the WTO got its hooks into India it (along with the US government) pretty much forced the country to create legislature preventing Indian farmers storing domestic grain seed. The big Western companies then dumped an overwhelming quantity of seed stock into the market forcing the remaining Indian grain sellers out of business. Unfortunately, pretty much all of the grain was GM programmed to auto-sterilise. Once farmers adopted the grain (after intense protest) prices were - predictably - jacked up. What followed for many was a tragic debt spiral. When grain sales reached the point where they couldn't cover the costs of next year's seeds many landowners got involved with loan sharks and so forth and within one or two years it was all over. The final chilling irony is that many farmers chose to commit suicide by drinking the very same pesticides which they were forced to buy for their crops (standard pesticides were either ineffective or killed the plant - co-incidence?) Over the past few years there have been huge protests in India over the antics of the WTO, biotech companies and the government. In one year it is estimated that there were 140,000 suicides attributed in some way to this problem. Indeed, rising seed prices are one of the main reasons for the mass exodus of people from the country to the city and the swelling of India's appalling slums.
Now, let's recall that India was pretty much wheat-sufficient prior to its engagement in so-called "economic liberalisation". Technology, it seems, isn't everything.
I mean, it's bad enough when pharma companies patent some process the vast majority of which is based on freely available scientific knowledge and paid for by the taxpayer. But when the constituents of life itself are parcelled up, stamped "intellectual property" and a big, fat price tag attached things have clearly gone too far. That said, if people continue to turn a blind eye to such activities, only rising off their backsides whenever some issue over, say, NHS treatment directly affects THEM, they shouldn't complain when, at some future point, they discover every single cell in their bodies is now the property of someone else.
