Biotech Juggernaut: Hope, Hype, and Hidden Agendas of Entrepreneurial BioScience relates the intensifying effort of bioentrepreneurs to apply genetic engineering technologies to the human species and to extend the commercial reach of synthetic biology or "extreme genetic engineering." In 1980, legal developments concerning patenting laws transformed scientific researchers into bioentrepreneurs. Often motivated to create profit-driven biotech start-up companies or to serve on their advisory boards, university researchers now commonly operate under serious conflicts of interest. These conflicts stand in the way of giving full consideration to the social and ethical consequences of the technologies they seek to develop. Too often, bioentrepreneurs have worked to obscure how these technologies could alter human evolution and to hide the social costs of keeping on this path. Tracing the rise and cultural politics of biotechnology from a critical perspective, Biotech Juggernaut aims to correct the informational imbalance between producers of biotechnologies on the one hand, and the intended consumers of these technologies and general society, on the other. It explains how the converging vectors of economic, political, social, and cultural elements driving biotechnology’s swift advance constitutes a juggernaut. It concludes with a reflection on whether it is possible for an informed public to halt what appears to be a runaway force.
Drawing on a wide range of literature and on interviews with firms, this book explores issues of economic growth with a focus on six East Asian cities: Bangkok, Beijing, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore, and Tokyo. It suggests how policies and institutions can induce and furnish an urban environment that supports innovative activities. A valuable resource for researchers, urban planners, urban geographers, and policy makers interested in East Asia.
This book is a short description of how Zionist zealots have planned and implemented messianic protocols since 3,000 BCE by writing a bible that stole creation myths from the Babylonian Enuma Elish and the Egyptian Book of the Dead and by stealing the sacred stones of the Egyptian Ark of the Great Pyramid under the leadership of Akhenaten (Moses) and fleeing to Palestine where they, once again, took over the land occupied by the Canaanites and called it Israel. Archeologic and genetic data support that both Jews and Palestinians came from ancient Canaanites, who extensively mixed with Egyptians, Mesopotamian, and Anatolian peoples in ancient times. Thus, Palestinian-Jewish rivalry is based solely on cultural and religious, but not in genetic differences. Does anyone really believe that the storm God El, then Baal, then combined with Yahweh wrote the bible and decided that Jews would be the chosen people. Since the Spring of 2020, when mandated Covid-19 vaccines began, excess deaths have increased dramatically across the globe to about 20%, while unknown causes of death have increased significantly. The numerous lockdowns (stay at home of the workforce), fear campaigns, COVID-19 policy mandates imposed on approximately 193 member states of the United Nations have also contributed to undermining and destabilizing the very fabric of civil society and its institutions including education, culture and the arts, social gatherings, sports, entertainment; all public sector activities including physical and social infrastructure, social services, law enforcement; all major private sector activities which characterize national, regional and local economies including small, medium and large corporate enterprises, family farms, industry, wholesale and retail trade, the urban services economy, transport companies, airlines, hotel chains; the structures of the global economy including international commodity trade, investment, import and export relations between countries, while the entire landscape of the global economy has been shattered. Each culture has a ‘Creation Myth’ that is contained in their own understanding of those cataclysm events that occurred between 10,500 BCE and 685 BCE. The West has primarily used the myth in the Judeo-Christian bible. However, you would think in the year 2020 people would understand that the bible is fiction and has significant reasons for concern, such as the following: the similarities of stories; obvious rehashing of numerous previous character; unavoidable contradictions; significant moral problems, including rape, murder and incest, and an abundance of nagging questions. Unless you are mindless, one can easily understand that a book like this can be used mainly for control, but in some hands it can be used to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Bible Is Really the Story of Creation of the Solar System. The Bible was initially stories that were written down and cobbled together and tales told verbally by their descendants over thousands of years that tried to explain the birth of the present Solar System, and what the survivors witnessed. It began in about 10,500 BCE and ended about 685 BCE. Millions of years ago, our Earth and was created by an expulsion of plasma from its brown dwarf star, now known as the Planet Saturn. Mars was also created from a plasma expulsion from the brown dwarf, when it came under electrical stress in the plasma Universe. Saturn, as a brown dwarf, with the Earth and Mars within its plasma glow mode, had an atmosphere of salt, hydrocarbons and water that misted down on both planets for millions or billions of years, providing its oceans and oil pockets. Brown dwarfs are known to be the best home for the development of life since the glow mode provides one warm temperature with no seasons and promotes growth under its ultraviolet and infrared atmosphere. It has recently been discovered that Saturn is the only planet with the same molecular type of water as Earth. Our Earth does not wobble around its pole, as is currently believed, every 25,920 years due to solar-lunar forces acting on the Earth. It was known long ago by the Ancients that the so called change in some stars ‘precessing’ against the sky was caused by the path of our sun and planets and other stars travelling and revolving around electric Birkeland Current filaments that circle around certain stars; the star Arcturus, the star Alcyone and the star Sirius. The revolution of our current Sun with Sirus occurs every 25,000 years, with the Arcturus filament stream every 550,000 years and with Alcyone, and the Pleiades star system, every 26-27 million years. This last cycle is important since it corresponds to the same 26-27 million year extinction cycle of our Earth. It is believed that Earth’s extinction level events occurred as the Saturnian System with Earth and Mars within its orbit crossed the position of our current Sun and its planets every 26-27 million years, resulting in the mass extinctions. The biology of Earth is such a complete accident, and so utterly unlikely that it will probably not have ever been duplicated anywhere, at anytime, among the billions of other star systems. But here on Earth, all of it, especially the rise of complex species since the Cambrian, 560 million years ago, can be attributed to a series of cataclysmic plasma strikes by Saturn, each of a very long duration: biologists claim 10,000 years for the extinction events. At about 10,500 BCE, the Earth, at that time a planet of the Sun, made an electric field contact with Saturn, causing 1500 years of darkness on Earth. The period of darkness is recognized by many of the world's creation myths and was recorded in the illustrated graphic books of Mesoamerica, references to which are made in the Colonial period documents. Climatologically, the period is identified today as the Younger Dryas, when for some 1500 years Earth got as cold as it had ever been. Over the next 7000 years the orbit of Earth, apparently equal to the orbit of Saturn at that time, but below Saturn, progressively moved laterally to have the Earth's orbital path eventually travel below the centre of Saturn. Thus, between 10,500 BCE and 3147 BCE, earth was part of a strange configuration of stacked planets, a condition which provided long summers and a mild climate in the northern hemisphere. Planets, dominated by the giant form of Saturn, stood above the north horizon and close to Earth but measured in millions of miles and were taken by humans to be the Gods who supported them and for whose benefit they labored at agriculture and conducted trade. In 4070 BCE, Saturn dropped its coma. This had been the ‘chaos before creation’, which had lasted some 7,000 years and had obscured Saturn and its companion satellites. Saturn went Nova, and switched to arc mode. In a mass expulsion Saturn produced its rings and a new satellite, Venus. Saturn lit up more brilliantly than the Sun. For humans of Earth, who had not clearly seen the real Sun for thousands of years because of the shadow of the Younger Dryas, followed by the obscurity of the enclosing plasmasphere of Saturn, this was the creation, the start of time, and the first showing of the land and its resident Gods, the satellites of Saturn. Saturn was universally called the Sun throughout the world at this time. In 3147 BCE, as Mars began the oscillate between Venus and Earth this configuration of standing planets became unstable and broke apart, with the three large planets moving away from the Sun, while Earth, Venus and Mars were released to their overlapping inner orbits. The breakup produced a stupendous flood waters, which had been held at the south polar region due to gravitational attraction of Saturn for some 7,000 years. The water held at the South Pole was due to the lifting up of the Earth’s crust in the Arctic, and the sinking toward the Earth’s interior in Antarctica. This was the end of the ‘Golden Age’. When the Solar System re-arrangent was complete it formed the basis of all religions, myths and mystery schools.
The experiences of Singapore, Finland, and Ireland show how small resource-poor economies, even if peripherally located, can achieve rapid and sustained growth: through a strategy of building quality human capital that attracts technology-intensive FDI and enables national firms to compete in global markets for high-value products and services.
This second edition of International Public Health Policy and Ethics complements the popular first edition with contemporary problems in international public health. It brings together philosophers and practitioners to address the foundations and principles upon which public health policy may be advanced – especially in the international arena. What is the basis that justifies public health in the first place? Why should individuals be disadvantaged for the sake of the group? How do policy concerns and clinical practice work together and work against each other? Can the boundaries of public health be extended to include social ills that are amenable to group-dynamic solutions? What about political issues? How can international finance make an impact? These are some of the crucial questions that form the core of this volume of original essays sure to cause practitioners to engage in a critical re-evaluation of the role of ethics in public health policy. With a targeted new essay dealing with COVID and public health issues in Africa this second edition provides a resource building on the first edition.
The importance of East Asia in the global economy is now unquestionable, and its market expansion, driven by a population of nearly 1.9 billion, will strongly influence the tempo of international trade and growth of global incomes, However, while the region's economies have amply demonstrated their potential, their future performance is by no means ensured. This book offers an in-depth analysis of the policy trade-offs identified in the recently published Can East Asia Compete? (WB and OUP, 2002). The major contribution of the new book to that it shows how stability can be a stepping-stone to growth that is led by innovation; identifies and analyzes the ingredients of an innovative economy, and discusses how these ingredients mesh with government policy and market initiatives.
Mahayana, Theravada, ancient, modern? Even at the most basic level, the diversity of Buddhism makes a comprehensive approach daunting. This book is a first step in solving the problem. In foregrounding the bodies of practitioners, a solid platform for analysing the philosophy of Buddhism begins to become apparent. Building upon somaesthetics Buddhism is seen for its ameliorative effect, which spans the range of how the mind integrates with the body. This exploration of positive effect spans from dreams to medicine. Beyond the historical side of these questions, a contemporary analysis includes its intersection with art, philosophy, and ethnography.
Barry Buzan proposes a new approach to making International Relations a truly global discipline that transcends both Eurocentrism and comparative civilisations. He narrates the story of humankind as a whole across three eras, using its material conditions and social structures to show how global society has evolved. Deploying the English School's idea of primary institutions and setting their story across three domains - interpolity, transnational and interhuman - this book conveys a living historical sense of the human story whilst avoiding the overabstraction of many social science grand theories. Buzan sharpens the familiar story of three main eras in human history with the novel idea that these eras are separated by turbulent periods of transition. This device enables a radical retelling of how modernity emerged from the late 18th century. He shows how the concept of 'global society' can build bridges connecting International Relations, Global Historical Sociology and Global/World History.
This book provides an analysis of the ways in which the BAC has established an ethical framework for biomedical research in Singapore, following the launch of the Biomedical Sciences Initiative by the Singapore Government. The editors and authors have an intimate knowledge of the working of the BAC, and the focus of the book includes the ways in which international forces have influenced the form and substance of bioethics in Singapore. Together, the authors offer a comparative account of the institutionalisation of biomedical research ethics in Singapore, considered in the wider context of international regulatory efforts. The book reviews the work of the BAC by placing it within the broader cultural, social and political discourses that have emerged in relation to the life sciences since the turn of the 21st century. This book is not primarily intended to be a retrospect or an appraisal of the contribution of the BAC, though this is one aspect of it. Rather, the main intention is to make a substantive contribution to the rapidly emerging field of bioethics. Ethical discussions in the book include consideration of stem cell research and cloning, genetics and research with human participants, and focus on likely future developments as well as the past.Many of the contributors of the book have been personally involved in this work, and hence they write with an authoritative first-hand knowledge that scholars in bioethics and public policy may appreciate. As indicated above, the book also explains the way in which ethics and science ? international and local ? have interacted in a policy setting. Scholars and policy makers may find the Singaporean experience to be a valuable resource, as the approach has been to make the ethical governance of research in Singapore consistent with international best practice while observing the requirements of a properly localised application of universally accepted principles. In addition, at least three chapters (the first three chapters in particular) are accessible to the lay reader interested in the development of bioethics and biomedical sciences, both inside and outside Singapore, from 2000 (the year in which the BAC was established). Both scholars and interested lay readers are therefore likely to find this publication a valuable reference.
