Gene Myths

Exploding the Gene Myth and The Human Body Shop address the incursion of the marketplace into the human body. Ruth Hubbard and Elijah Wald focus on the politics of genetic manipulation from a biological perspective. Andrew Kimbrell addresses the commodification of the human body from a legal standpoint. Both are dedicated to a new understanding of "progress" in the medical and laboratory sciences.

Exploding the Gene Myth describes the manipulation of genetic information by scientists, physicians, employers, insurance companies and law enforcers, for a general public without biological training. The authors warn of the dangers of commercialization and corporatization of genetics. In 1992, biotechnology companies spent about 24 percent of their income on marketing, and their sales people made 3 million visits to doctors' offices to market products.

Hubbard and Wald's scientific and lay perspectives, respectively, encourage citizen participation in forming genetic policies. By mastering the basics of genetics, the reader can enter the debate over the significance of genetic research. Hubbard urges the reader to look critically at grandiose promises made by molecular biologists who elicit funds for massive research projects by saying their project will explain what it means to be human. Such exaggeration only magnifies the importance society assigns to genes and heredity, she argues.

Exploding the Gene Myth addresses limitations of current scientific paradigms and advocates broadening our modes of thinking. Hubbard cautions against over-reliance on "reductionism," a limiting paradigm that views organisms only in terms of their smallest parts rather than looking at them as a whole.

In approaching social problems, genetic "solutions" provide only partial answers. For example, as Hubbard notes, the problem with linking all health problems to genes, is that it focuses attention on what is happening inside people and draws attention away from external environmental factors.

Without genetic policies that broaden our scientific perspectives, the potential for losing our civil liberties and privacy is great. Exploding the Gene Myth explores how genetic information could be used to discriminate against people at work, school and via medical and insurance institutions. Hubbard and Wald are concerned about the rise of a subtle "new eugenics" movement, in part supported by proponents of gene therapy, that would screen out fetuses with genetic diseases. Life is venerable, they contend.

The sacredness of life is also the underlying theme of The Human Body Shop. Although selling one's body is the oldest profession in the world, the twentieth century has added a frightening twist to the age-old profession. Human beings are now being manipulated in a much more fundamental and penetrating fashion.

Kimbrell illustrates, with case studies, how the machine of the biotechnology industrial age may be the human body. As he outlines, the consequences of selling body parts are hair-raising. Examples range from blood banks exploiting homeless people and drug addicts who donate blood to pay for food or their addiction, to baby brokers and prospective parents canceling a surrogate mother's contract because of the baby's predisposition to obesity, to selling a kidney in order to buy a restaurant. Such gruesome renderings of the body-broker scene are vivid examples of a form of barbarism not only accepted but also promulgated by the world market place.

In a thorough manner, the book chronicles the expanding human body shop driven by what Kimbrell calls "the gospel of greed." In the United States, individuals sell their rare blood to pharmaceutical companies for up to $6,000 a pint. Kidneys sell for $10,000 to $40,000. Sperm sell for $50 per donation, and some even have "fathered" hundreds of children. Human genes are patented and bartered. Before society becomes completely inured to the marketing of the human body, Kimbrell seeks to remind readers of a time when such marketing would have been taboo.

Kimbrell ends the book by suggesting policies to help enter the twenty-first century intelligently, by providing for the sick while protecting the "donors." Reviving the notion of the human body as "venerable and priceless," a view held by cultures as diverse as Native Americans and ancient Romans, would ensure a much more promising future, he writes. The solution to "the human body shop" problem is embedded in the principle of giving, which "affirms a sense of community, charity, reverence and a spontaneous sense of human relations."

Both of these books serve as reminders of what happens when science and the market place are unscrupulously mixed. Hubbard and Wald illustrate how science is culturally bound; while Kimbrell shows how science has simultaneously changed society's cultural rules.