Feed Me!
Remember the play Little Shop of Horrors and the alien plant keeps demanding, "Feed me!" This is now the mantra of Big Biotech. In country after country, state after state,and locality after locality, lobbyists for the biotech industry, their research allies/business partners at universities, and bioethicists demand an ever increasing level of public support for their private research. And they have governments on the run by warning direly that unless increased support comes in, the country, the state, or even, as in this story, the locality will "fall behind" and lose tax revenues, jobs, treatments, etc. The effect is to whipsaw these localities into competing to throw the most money, tax benefits, etc. at these companies. PA, for example, is about to throw $500 million at stem cell research. To paraphrase a Mel Brooks line, "It's good to be Big Biotech."
If this tactic were being employed by Big Oil, Big Tobacco, or Big Pharama, the media would be in high dudgeon. But journalists are in utter thrall to Big Biotech, so they obediently help in the search to fulfill the never ending demand, "Feed me!"
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 8:08 AM
1 Comments
1 Comments:
Interesting comparison, Wesley. In the movie version of "Little Shop," our hero Seymore saves the girl and kills the plant. Typical happy ending. In the original play, however, the plant killed the girl and Seymore fed her to it, and then, trying to redeme himself.... got eaten, too. The movie originally had that ending but the test audiences were queasy with it, so it was altered.
I know that you feel that the media is so enamoured with Big Biotech that they're misrepresenting the situation to the public, but it's occurred to me that if the media had a field day exposing BB, the discomfort level of the general public would be so overwhelming that they'd tune it out.
People want to be comfortable. They're afraid of crime, so they push to outlaw guns. They don't like animal abuse, so they give money to PETA. They don't like being fat, so they force McDonalds to change its menu.
You notice that in none of these cases will people do things that actually make a difference, like starting a neighborhood watch program, volunteering for the local animal shelter, or eating less and exercizing. Big Biotech offers a lot of benefits. If it's exposed, people aren't going to want to know about it, because in this instance there's no fast-food approach to "fixing" the problem. No warm and fuzzy answer to the situation. When a problem arises that there's no feel-good solution to, people shut down on the problem. They ignore it. They won't deal with it.
I wonder how many people researched their elected officials on issues such as foreign oil dependency, Middle East strategies, and homeland terror strategies. Most of the people I know at my job didn't even think of those things when they voted. Most of them want to pull out of Iraq because they think things are going badly, since the problem hasn't gone away yet. No fast-food solution, so they think, pull everyone back home and ignore it, without even asking, "what's really going on over there?"
Big Biotech? It looks like a savior at the moment because it promises fast solutions that won't take people out of their comfort zones. People support it because supporting it is the easy thing to do. And if they found out that it didn't offer fast and easy solutions, they'd shut down on the issue altogether, leaving BB to lurk in the background without making any kinds of waves. Nobody would want to deal with it.
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