Interview with "Body Shopping" author
Posted by Marcy Darnovsky June 26, 2009
Biopolitical Times
British author and activist Donna Dickenson’s book about the business in body parts is recently out in paperback, with a new subtitle that makes it Body Shopping: Converting Body Parts to Profit.
A fascinating interview with her was posted yesterday at RH Reality Check, one of the top blogs on reproductive rights and health. From her remarks:
My goal in writing the book was to take these developments out of the scientific or academic literature and describe them for a non-specialist audience….I think the greatest difficulty isn't so much that a popular audience can't easily understand the science and medicine, but that we live in a very polarized society. Anyone who isn't one hundred percent behind every new development in biotechnology is often portrayed as either ignorant or doctrinaire - frequently, at least in the UK, as a religious zealot.
Many people have been persuaded - falsely - that's if we want the genuine benefits that modern biomedicine can bring us, we have to accept all the scientific developments uncritically....
I did not set out to shock, horrify, disturb or alarm, but to explore the ways in which modern biotechnology is commodifying areas of our life from BC (before conception) to AD (after death), and what we can do about it.