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Redesigning Life?: The Worldwide Challenge to Genetic Engineering, edited by Brian Tokar. London; New York: Zed Books; New York: Distributed by Palgrave, 2001. 440 pp. $69.95 cloth. ISBN: 1-85649-834-4. $19.95 paper. ISBN: 0-85649-835-2.
In Redesigning Life?, Brian Tokar, environmental activist and faculty member of the Institute for Social Ecology and Goddard College in Vermont, has assembled a collection of writings from activists and critics of the global biotechnology industry. As the subtitle indicates, the theme of the collection is at once a critique of the genetic revolution currently driving that industry and a manifesto of a countermovement. All selections expound the theme that "biotechnology and genetic engineering have become powerful symbols of what is most fundamentally wrong with our society" (p. 2): concentration of political and economic power in the hands of an increasingly narrow and integrated set of industrial actors; economic globalization and the widening gap between rich and poor; worldwide loss of food security; and the reduction of the world and its inhabitants to commodified bio-- bits, manipulated to the ultimate benefit of an extravagantly wealthy few.
What is of most interest in this volume is the expression it gives to a counter-expertise to claims forwarded by biotechnology stake holders. While industry and its government allies have moved rapidly since the...