Genetic Engineering - Dream or Nightmare: Turning the Tide on the Brave New World of Bad Science and Big Business

By Mae-Wan Ho

Book Overview

Is genetic engineering a modern magic wand, responsible for producing fantastic crops to feed the world's hungry and a miracle cure-all for human disease? Or, as this book claims, is it an untried and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0826412572
• ISBN13: 9780826412577
• Release Date: January 2000
• Publisher: Continuum
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 5.3" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Brilliant

The ingenious author heartstopping book takes you beyond hardfacts of modern era of science into a mixed sequel of passion and technology.A must read masterpiece.Utterly compelling.

A far more important book than its title indicates

While Dr. Ho's book is indeed a warning about the hazards and inequities involved in uncontrolled and exploitative genetic engineering, it is also one of the most incisive and well-informed critiques of the orthodox neo-Darwinian model of evolution by chance mutation and natural selection, addressing head-on the popular myths propagated by writers such as Jacques Monod, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. Ho's conception of evolution as a global organismic process rather than a gradual, random, piece-by-piece accretion is firmly founded on scientific evidence rather than on dogma and suggests the possibility of integrating such a view with one in which the entire universe has conspired to produce and sustain life. It has been fifty years since Monod pronounced the doctrine that evolution is "absolutely free but blind." The very notion of directed or adaptive mutations has been too long regarded as heresy by neo-Darwinists and it is refreshing to hear a scientist of Ho's stature embracing and presenting the evidence for it.

A timely warning about technology out of control

Dr. Ho has written a very important book that addresses in understandable language the threat posed by the alliance of corporations and technologists. She attacks shoddy science put to the use of corporate profit and shows that the potential threat of this poorly controlled technology is enormous. Transgenic disease, massive food crop failures and the potential for racist eugenics are only part of what she covers. The fact that corporations based in the industrial north can exclusively patent and control native plants that have existed for millenia under new laws is an appalling fact that could potentially turn all societies into forced consumers of corporately owned products that were previously freely available to all. This is a broadly based argument that addresses issues far beyond the laboratory and the board room and brings into question many of the presumptions we have about science, economics, medicine and ownership of the world's resources. An important book!