Re: <nettime> stem cells

[Julian Assange <proff@suburbia.net>]

> how much would women be paid per donation?  i am sure western women 
> would be unwilling to supply the vast volumes of eggs and would be too 
> expensive, so what about women from other countries, surely they could 
> do with earning extra hard foreign currency? their genome is by and 
> large irrelevant anyway. so multinational pharmaceutical companies, that 
> have by now developed a huge therapeutic cloning sector, set up ovum 
> harvesting facilities in india, china and wherever else there are lots 
> of disenfranchised women. a little bit like nike and its shoe factories 
> in the phillipines. do westerners prefer their organs grown from an 
> indian ovum or an italian one? so by now the west has fucked over the 
> poor of the world by exploiting them down to their dna, and even that is 
> not wanted, just the empty ovum.

I'd much prefer to have my `dna' (infact the cellular evelope of the
ovum which contains no DNA) exploited than my time or mind or
happyness.  The situation you are describing suggests large flows
of money from west to east. This is a good thing. The real question
here is whether there are any significant negative health risks to
donators. If you believe in Indian population control, then this
could be a great incentive.

> molecular geneticist/executive boosters are saying that this generation 
> can look forward to living to 150 quite easily - if you are rich male 
> and white of course. and who are the richest, whitest and most male? 

No. Being rich, female and informed are almost certainly the three necessary
qualities.

--
 Julian Assange        |If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people
                       |together to collect wood or assign them tasks and
 proff@iq.org          |work, but rather teach them to long for the endless
 proff@gnu.ai.mit.edu  |immensity of the sea. -- Antoine de Saint Exupery

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