Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0385528922, Hardcover)
From the award-winning author of Medical Apartheid, an exposé of the rush to own and exploit the raw materials of life—including yours. Think your body is your own to control and dispose of as you wish? Think again. The United States Patent Office has granted at least 40,000 patents on genes controlling the most basic processes of human life, and more are pending. If you undergo surgery in many hospitals you must sign away ownership rights to your excised tissues, even if they turn out to have medical and fiscal value. Life itself is rapidly becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of the medical- industrial complex.
Deadly Monopolies is a powerful, disturbing, and deeply researched book that illuminates this “life patent” gold rush and its harmful, and even lethal, consequences for public health. It examines the shaky legal, ethical, and social bases for Big Pharma’s argument that such patents are necessary to protect their investments in new drugs and treatments, arguing that they instead stifle the research, competition, and innovation that can drive down costs and save lives. In opposing the commodification of the body, Harriet Washington provides a crucial human dimension to an often all-too-abstract debate.
Like the bestseller
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,
Deadly Monopolies reveals in shocking detail just how far the profit motive has encroached in colonizing human life and compromising medical ethics. It is sure to stir debate—and instigate change.
(retrieved from Amazon Thu, 24 Jan 2013 20:10:11 -0500)
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Wikipedia in English
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On the one hand, researchers have an increased pool of resources to conduct their work.
On the other hand, genes and other bodily functions can be patented, pharmaceutical prices are forced up to unfathomably high levels, and very treatable diseases are left to ravage the poorest areas of the world, all in the name of profit.
A frightening read, showing what happens when one 'approaches the temple of medicine with the soul of the money-changer'. (