Our workshop in FSM 3 in Porto Alegre, held on January 25th at 13.30(predio 50 room 501) ha dthe following title "The Culture of Reductionism, GMOs and Animal Experimentation" (Area II)
Our speakers, who effectively attended, were:
Jean Pierre Berlan
Gianni Tamino
Enrico Moriconi
Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio
Laura Cima
Fabrizia Pratesi
KEYWORDS: Biotech, GMOs, Animal Experimentation and patents on life
The likening of living organisms to machines has made it possible to instrumentalize and exploit them according to the logic of profit. Thus, patented gmos, far from opening a promising world free from hunger and desease, are closing two centuries of a scientific and economic drive to industrialize agriculture, applying the industrial principles of uniformity, specialization and standardization to living organisms and to agriculture.
Patented gmos are also the response to the "prejudice" suffered by the capital through the habit of plants and animals of reproducing freely in the farmers fields Terminator, the technology that sterilizes plants on being sowed for the second time, thus appears to be the most colossal triumph of applied genetics in the last 150 years: the triumph of the law of profit over the law of life.
These developments are themselves rooted in a mechanistic - or reductionist - culture of science, which interprets natural phenomena in a linear cause-effect relationship and ignores the enormous complexity of natural systems. The same reductionist culture has led to a very common "scientific" practice, that of animal experimentation. Animal experimentation is still in use, although the progress in scientific knowledge has shown that it lacks any scientific basis, is obsolete, and is an obstacle to the progress of medical science: a method as senseless as it is cruel, because the outcome of an animal experiment can never apply to a human being.
Our propositions are:
Promote the principle of "No patents on life" and therefore:
- refuse the TRIPS agreements of the WTO
- repeal existing patent laws
Ban the use of animal models in scientific research and introduce laws that replace animal experimentation with scientific methods aimed at obtaining results relevant to human beings.
Introduce ethical rules in any research involving living - human or non-human - organisms. these parameters must include the principles of responsibility and of precaution, especially in respect of technological applications.
Reintroduce, at the same time, the respect of any lifeform and of the value of all living creatures on the planet.
Promote the sharing of genetic resources and of knowledge instead of their cartelization by a handful transnational corporations, as well as international cooperation against economic wars.
updated on 09/09/2010
