Genetic Engineering-Dream or Nightmare?: The Brave New World of Bad Science and Big Business [Paperback]

Mae-Wan Ho (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1858600510 | ISBN-13: 978-1858600512 | Publication Date: April 1998

Is genetic engineering a modern magic wand, responsible for producing fantastic crops to feed the world's hungry and a miracle cure-all for human disease? Or, as this book claims, is it an untried and inadequalty researched technology that is out of control with nightmarish results? The author aims to show how genetic determinism is at odds with the reality of scientific findings; gives rise to misguided practices and projects that are unethical and exploitative; and is hazardous to human and animal health and the ecological environment.

Product Details

• Paperback: 277 pages
• Publisher: Gateway Books (April 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1858600510
• ISBN-13: 978-1858600512
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,294,040 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A timely warning about technology out of control, June 6, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Genetic Engineering-Dream or Nightmare?: The Brave New World of Bad Science and Big Business (Paperback)

Dr. Ho has written a very important book that addresses in understandable language the threat posed by the alliance of corporations and technologists. She attacks shoddy science put to the use of corporate profit and shows that the potential threat of this poorly controlled technology is enormous. Transgenic disease, massive food crop failures and the potential for racist eugenics are only part of what she covers. The fact that corporations based in the industrial north can exclusively patent and control native plants that have existed for millenia under new laws is an appalling fact that could potentially turn all societies into forced consumers of corporately owned products that were previously freely available to all. This is a broadly based argument that addresses issues far beyond the laboratory and the board room and brings into question many of the presumptions we have about science, economics, medicine and ownership of the world's resources. An important book!

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A far more important book than its title indicates, March 13, 1999

By 

Keith A. Chandler "Publisher" (Miami, FL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Genetic Engineering-Dream or Nightmare?: The Brave New World of Bad Science and Big Business (Paperback)

While Dr. Ho's book is indeed a warning about the hazards and inequities involved in uncontrolled and exploitative genetic engineering, it is also one of the most incisive and well-informed critiques of the orthodox neo-Darwinian model of evolution by chance mutation and natural selection, addressing head-on the popular myths propagated by writers such as Jacques Monod, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. Ho's conception of evolution as a global organismic process rather than a gradual, random, piece-by-piece accretion is firmly founded on scientific evidence rather than on dogma and suggests the possibility of integrating such a view with one in which the entire universe has conspired to produce and sustain life. It has been fifty years since Monod pronounced the doctrine that evolution is "absolutely free but blind." The very notion of directed or adaptive mutations has been too long regarded as heresy by neo-Darwinists and it is refreshing to hear a scientist of Ho's stature embracing and presenting the evidence for it.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, February 3, 2000

By 

ali subhani usman (Lahore,Pakistan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Genetic Engineering-Dream or Nightmare?: The Brave New World of Bad Science and Big Business (Paperback)

The ingenious author heartstopping book takes you beyond hardfacts of modern era of science into a mixed sequel of passion and technology.A must read masterpiece.Utterly compelling.