Andrew Kimbell’s Human Body Shop is written to shock. Shocking facts
are sometimes needed to wake people up, but the more important aspect of
the book is that it shows how the outrageous in medical technology is simply
a logical culmination of already existing trends. We are not, as we imagine,
at the top of the slippery slope: we are already halfway down and slipping
fast. At the bottom lies the full-scale commercialisation of the human body.

What makes the picture that Kimbrell paints so worrying is that we are
not merely slipping: there are large market forces pushing us down the slope,
and our boots seem to have been made from banana skins. One reason we slip
so fast is because we have inherited and grown up with a secular Western
philosophy that views the human body as mere biological technology, quite
separate from the self. When medical benefits are promised, we lack a system
of ethics that attaches human value to the body.

The story of commercialisation begins with the sale of blood. The issue
of the payment for blood donation has been debated since the 1950s and,
although the arguments for the social value of unpaid donations have generally
won the day, payment for blood still continues in the US. There is a multimillion
dollar market in ‘speciality’ blood, which may contain valuable antibodies
or other factors. The market in human organs for transplants flourishes
in parts of the Third World, especially India, despite being banned in the
US, Britain and many other countries.

Undoubtedly, the grisliest chapter deals with the use of fetal tissue.
Throughout the years of the ban (now rescinded by President Bill Clinton)
on federal funding for fetal tissue research, an unregulated fetal tissue
industry worth $1 million a year supplied researchers with tissue from
abortion clinics. Although the spectre of ‘fetal farming’ might seem far-fetched,
there are already cases of children conceived and born for the express purpose
of providing tissue for transplant to siblings, and there are reports of
women proposing to conceive to abort the fetus and use its tissue for treating
themselves or family members.

Kimbrell’s main target is the new biotechnologies, particularly reproductive
and genetic engineering, and the way they are leading to a view of the body
as a collection of commodities. But this state of things is not only about
buying and selling: as the recent furore over reproductive technology has
shown, it is also about breaking down an intricate process into a series
of discrete steps for the purposes of manipulation. Human reproduction is
not only a biological process: it is a psychological, anthropological and
social process which is at the core of ideas of the self. The reduction
of reproduction to ‘gamete technology’ cannot help but do violence to our
understanding of ourselves, and is bound to lead to the so-called ‘yuk’
response, an involuntary revulsion. Like reproduction itself, that response
is far more than merely physiological. It is an inchoate expression of traditional
understandings of the self, which is only irrational within a world-view
that is basically ignorant of society.

Already, the selling of sperm, eggs and babies (through surrogacy) is
raising a set of increasingly bizarre legal and ethical issues. Is a fetus
or a ‘pre-embryo’ a person or property? Is it possible to regulate a mother’s
emotions in the surrogacy contract, by forbidding her from attempting to
form emotional attachments to the child? There is a general trend in case
law to regard the woman who gives birth as little more than an incubator,
with no legal rights. This situation is made worse by the fact that most
of the women who offer their reproductive services in the US are poor, and
often black or Hispanic, while the clients tend to be affluent and white.

The philosophical issues come to a head over the issue of patenting
of human genes, cells and organs. In fact, companies have already submitted
patent applications, claiming women who may produce valuable pharmaceuticals
in their breast milk. But is the human body no more than a ‘composition
of matter’, which may be ‘invented’? Do we ‘own’ our cells and tissues?
In the celebrated Moore case the US courts seem to have decided that while
individuals have no legal claim on their cells, once removed from the body,
patent holders may claim a monopoly on such cells.

How do we stop the slide towards commercialisation of the body? Kimbrell’s
solution is a return to Christian religious concepts of the sanctity and
inviolability of the human body. Yet this seems, to an outsider, a curious
rendition of Christian traditions. He repeatedly conflates Jewish and Christian
philosophies as ‘Judaeo-Christian’, but in Judaism, despite strict rules
on aspects of body morality, there is no hatred of the body as the source
of impurity and evil, and no tradition of mortification of the body which
we find in institutionalised Christianity. Rather than Christian principles
being violated and overturned by the philosophers of the Enlightenment,
it is only within a Christian culture that involves hatred of the body,
as well as all things material and earthy, that the idea of the body as
nothing more than a machine, to be bought and sold, could arise. While many
people now recognise the crisis in Enlightenment rationality, a lapse into
religious traditionalism is no more useful than an escape into post-modern
fantasy and relativism.

This is, nonetheless, an important and pioneering book. It is also an
extremely readable one. Kimbrell is a good storyteller, and although some
of his examples are arguably irrelevant and of the mudslinging variety,
they also provide fascinating insights into a society where the market reigns
supreme and where, as Karl Marx said, everything solid melts into air.

David King is with the Genetics Forum, London.

Did you ever wonder why large swathes of England are bright yellow,
rather than green and pleasant? Or where this garish crop that we call oilseed
rape, and the Americans and Canadians call canola, came from?

Canola was the result of more than 20 years of effort by Canadian plant
breeders searching for a domestic source of edible oil. They began with
rapeseed, Brassica napus oleifera, a plant regarded by many farmers as a
weed. It has a high oil yield – 40 per cent – but was grown only for industrial
oils because it contained high levels of erucic acid and glucosinolates.

Erucic acid harms humans by causing muscle lesions in the heart and
lipidosis, and oils are considered unfit for consumption if they contain
more than 5 per cent of the acid. When the plant cell walls are crushed
to extract oil, they release glucosinolates that react with other substances
in the rapeseed residue to poison it, rendering the residual meal unfit
for animal feed.

The researchers’ aim was produce a canola that was ‘double low’, with
reduced levels of erucic acid and glucosinolates. The first variety was
marketed in 1974. By 1992 canola was the world’s third most important oilseed.

What makes the story interesting is how publicly funded science became
the private intellectual property of transnational corporations, and how
corporate objectives became written into the seed’s genetic programme. In
the first phase, rapeseed research was publicly funded and information
and breeding material were freely exchanged among the scientists. All those
who participated agree that they would never have succeeded in producing
canola without that free exchange.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Canada’s neoliberal government cut public
science funding. As transnational corporations took over the plant breeding
industry, patents and corporate secrecy became the order of the day. Even
university scientists now have to compete for corporate funding, and do
not share information among themselves.

The basic corporate agenda, according to Brewster Kneen, is capital
intensification, commodification and the creation of farmer dependency.
The first key to this is the promotion of hybrids rather than varieties
capable of breeding true after pollination in open fields. A farmer cannot
resow hybrid seed, because it is either sterile or does not breed true,
so must return each year to the supplying company for seed. The companies
claim that hybrids will,by definition, give higher yields. Yet no one has
shown that the same could not be achieved through open-pollin-ated varieties,
given investment in the necessary research.

Another development that increasingly ties the farmer, not only to a
seed supplier but also to a particular buyer for the crop is the development
of ‘identity preserved’ oils. The plant breeders design a variety of canola
to match an industrial process or fit the marketing need of large companies.

The result of the pressure for elite varieties is an ever shrinking
pool of genetic diversity, as all the leading varieties come to be based
on a single industry standard. They are differentiated only by trivial changes
made for the purpose of gaining proprietary control.

While the companies argue that they are offering the farmer choice,
what the farmer needs is quality: a few reliable varieties that give reasonable
yield with good disease resistance.

An unfortunate defect of this book is that it reads much like a first
draft. Arguments put clearly and subtly in one place reappear later in a
crude and confusing form, and there are chunks of text that appear to have
no relation to the passages that precede them. There is no glossary or explanation
of scientific and farming terminology. The other main problem is the lack
of clarity in Kneen’s political and philosophical standpoint. In many places
the book sounds like some deep-green cry against modernity, economic development
and science in general; in others he uses Marxist terminology and concentrates
his attacks on transnational capital.

The poor editing, however, is outweighed by the way in which Kneen researched
the book, by interviewing all the key scientists and bureaucrats. By allowing
them to speak for themselves, he provides a fascinating insight into the
corporate and academic mindsets. This is a good book and an important one.
It tackles the key issues of how science is made to serve the interests
of capital, and how the lack of any self-critical tradition in science
permits this to happen. It should be required reading for anyone who still
believes in children’s tales about the neutrality and objectivity of science.

David King is the director of the Genetics Forum, based in London.