Bioevolution: How Biotechnology Is Changing Our World [Hardcover]

Michael Fumento (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 2003 | ISBN-10: 1893554759 | ISBN-13: 978-1893554757 | Edition: 1

Michael Fumento discusses the miracle drugs and treatment in the pipeline--innovations that will change medicine over the next decades, eliminating diseases such as diabetes.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"'BioEvolution' provides a sense of optimism and wisdom tempered by realism,...showing how human ingenuity can make life better." -- C.S. Prakash, Director, Center for Plant Biotechnology Research President, AgBioWorld Foundation, Tuskegee University

"Fumento takes the reader behind the scenes of the biotechnology business while lucidly explaining the scientific underpinnings of medical research." -- William W. Li, M.D., President, The Angiogenesis Foundation

"[A] wonderfully intelligent, well written, and wise look at...the new age of genetics and society." -- Bruce N. Ames, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of California, Berkeley, and recipient of the National Medal of Science

About the Author

Michael Fumento began writing about biotechnology as a reporter for "Investor's Business Daily" in 1993. A senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. and a weekly medical/health columnist for the Scripps Howard News Service, he is also the author of several books including "The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS;" "Science Under Siege;" and "The Fat of the Land: The Obesity Epidemic and How Overweight Americans Can Help Themselves." His work has also appeared in "Readers' Digest," "The Atlantic Monthly," "Forbes" and other magazines.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 485 pages
• Publisher: Encounter Books; 1 edition (December 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1893554759
• ISBN-13: 978-1893554757
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,382,911 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Keeping up with the Biotech World, November 10, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Bioevolution: How Biotechnology Is Changing Our World (Hardcover)

This book is brilliant, incisive, and oh-my-gosh is it informative! I'm not the world's biggest science fan. (In fact, I'm more into novels.) But this book grabbed me and wouldn't let go. I couldn't believe all of these things going around me were biotech, such as the breast cancer drug Herceptin. I knew that there are now drugs that actually treat autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis rather than merely relieving symptoms, but I had no idea they were grown from proteins spliced into cells from something called a Chinese Hamster. Nor did I have any idea that such drugs are becoming the new "aspirins," with the same medicine treating diseases like both rheumatoid arthritis and cancer that seemingly have nothing in common with each other.
In addition to medicine, the book looks at current and future gene-spliced crops and again I was amazed at the progress that's being made. Fumento takes the example of a single crop, rice, and shows how genes from this plant or that fungi can (and eventually will) be spliced into it rice to make it higher-yielding, more nutritious, and more resistant to bad temperature and weather conditions - all without chemicals.
The third part of the book - after medicines and crops - concerns "bioremediation." Essentially this means cleaning up toxic waste and other forms of pollution not through horribly expensive and destructive methods such as shoveling up dirt and burning it but rather through encouraging nature to do the job. This could mean using trees, bushes, fungi, or bacteria. As with the other areas of the book, these things are being used right now but Fumento takes us out five to ten years to see the miracles waiting in the wings. With new developments coming as fast as he says, I hope he's already at work on a BioEvolution sequel!

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A good overview but be skeptical of the details and bias, January 11, 2005

By 

Travis Lawless (Stanford, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bioevolution: How Biotechnology Is Changing Our World (Hardcover)

I am a biomedical scientist. Although I am very familiar with my immediate field (vaccine design), I simply cannot keep up with the pace of biotechnology. For this reason I did find this book useful by providing an overview of biotechnology. I do warn non-scientist readers though. It is very obvious that Michael Fumento is not a scientist and does not understand the basic principles of biology. As just one example, DNA is not made up of two strands of protein, as stated on page 10. His lack of a biology background is further reiterated by the lack of references to primary scientific literature. I would gather that he is not comfortable with interpreting such literature. This is unfortunate as this is a requirement for someone to write authoritively on such a subject. For these reasons, I would not take most of his "conclusions" seriously. There is a tremendous amount of bias in this book and it is not well founded with a good understanding of biological concepts. I did use several of his references as a starting point to do my own literature research to better understand areas of biotechnology.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sick with scaremongering news? Here's the antidote., October 20, 2003

By 

Jaime Arbona (Mayaguez, PR) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bioevolution: How Biotechnology Is Changing Our World (Hardcover)

You may often find science and medical news depressing. Not a day passes without one or several media scares, all screaming about imminent dangers that will adversely affect your health or even your survival. What can you do to clear this terrible feeling of despair off your mind? Try BioEvolution by Michael Fumento.

This book will give you a dose of reality you probably haven't heard much about - but should. As Fumento notes, biotech won't solve all of our problems but it has amazing potential to cure diseases for which we currently don't even have treatments, to feed a growing worldwide population with less land and fewer chemicals, to clean up our waterways and contaminated factory sites, and to transform our lives in wonderful ways we can barely imagine.

Right off you'll discover that biotech will produce unbelievable advances in medicine such as more effective vaccines for diseases like malaria, genital herpes, hepatitis C, cancer, the works. The only hope for an AIDS vaccine is biotech. And would you believe that you may be vaccinated against hepatitis, E. coli, and diseases that cause fatal diarrhea by eating a piece of fruit or a potato? There will be drugs that will zero in on tumors without attacking other cells. Like baldness and impotence remedies, treatments for aging are already moving out of the realm of quackery. Biotech will soon be used to extend both lifespans and the quality of life dramatically. Animal tests have shown incredible lifespan extensions of 50 percent or more!

If that is not enough to get you out of that funk, take a look at what's happening in agriculture. Gene engineering is already leading to miracle crops, in which the pesticide isn't sprayed on but rather built into the plants. That way the only bugs harmed are those that eat the crop itself. Soon we'll have plants that grow in temperatures and soils that today won't tolerate anything colored green. If those soils are contaminated with chemicals and heavy metals, biotech bacteria and plants will chow down on them like starving gamblers at a Las Vegas buffet.

This book will make you much more optimistic about the world's future - and yours! Perhaps the single best aspect is that virtually everybody reading BioEvolution will still be alive when many of the miracles described therein come to pass. It is also a treasure trove of information, but if you want even more there are enough citations at the end to provide you with biotech reading material for the rest of your life - or at least until you're 130, which you probably will be.