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The Human Body Shop

Name: The Human Body Shop
Author: Andrew Kimbrell
ISBN: 9780062505248

by Andrew Kimbrell

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Overview

The exploits of the new engineers and profiteers of life read more like science fiction than science fact. But fact they are, and frighteningly so. The human body and the other organisms of the earth are rapidly becoming the raw material for a new industrial age - a manufacturing revolution based on the manipulation and marketing of life. The escalating price placed on our most intimate possessions - our blood, organs, cells, and genes - along with the increasing ability of biotechnologies to alter the human body, has created a boom market for the human body shop. Using controversial case studies, Andrew Kimbrell exposes an industry based on the cloning of life forms, fetal tissue transplants, genetic engineering, and a host of startling new discoveries and techniques. With recombinant DNA technology it is now possible to transplant, snip, insert, recombine, rearrange, edit, program, and produce genetic and other living material just as our ancestors were able to heat, burn, melt, and solder together various inert materials. Scientists are, in fact, creating new combinations of animate matter just as the machine makers of the past century created new shapes, combinations, and forms of inanimate matter. Whether in the areas of human health and childbearing or in the manipulation of viruses and other microbes, these advances, though extraordinary accomplishments, actually represent a remarkable and insidious invasion of the sanctity of life by the same engineering and marketing imperatives that dictated the direction of the Industrial Age. This extension of the ideologies of efficiency and the market to what is now being called the Age of Biotechnology is among the most disturbing technological, philosophical, and ethical transitions in recorded history. The Human Body Shop lifts the cloak of secrecy and confusion that has long concealed the astounding and shocking experiments involving the manipulation, engineering, and marketing of life forms. Explaining the ne

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This is the most disturbing and damning report to date on the biotechnology revolution and its ethical and social consequences and risks. Kimbrell, policy director of the Foundation of Economic Trends in Washington, D.C., first looks at a new multibillion-dollar industry involving the manipulation and marketing of blood, organs and fetal parts. He then moves on to the patenting of genetically engineered animals and even of human ``products'' (e.g., cells and genes) and the selling of human reproductive materials. He condemns surrogate motherhood as a form of ``bioslavery,'' and warns of the high ethical price of the new eugenics. Extrapolating from current trends, Kimbrell ominously predicts the genetic engineering of workers to enhance productive traits and the cloning of humans in the coming decades. His sane prescriptions for restricting the engineering and marketing of life cap his scary, Orwellian glimpse into a new biofuture. Photos. $25,000 ad/promo; author tour. (May)

William Beatty

The first three-quarters of this book looks at the visible elements of the problem. Kimbrell shows that human blood and body parts were first used externally, primarily as gifts, whereas now they are bought and sold as commodities. Baby-making has moved through husband and then donor insemination on to surrogate motherhood. Amniocentesis and genetic operations have led beyond the legitimate hope for a healthy baby to the fashionable desire for a bland and perfect baby. Steroids and human growth hormone are also becoming part of this trendy yearning, with little thought for the individuals who are directly involved. In the final quarter of his book, Kimbrell gets down to the real business: the damage being done by the uncontrolled actions of Adam Smith's free marketplace. We must no longer be ruled by the beliefs that the body is merely a mechanism or that we may aggressively market all of its parts--from genes to organs. Kimbrell concludes this thought-provoking volume with an outline of methods to counteract these two basic evils.