Abstract
The American cultural and political landscape has seen changes on the level of seismic shifts in the past four decades, thanks in part to the two very diverse fields of big business and biotechnology. Linking the two arenas together in the literary landscape is a growing body of young adult science fiction that envisions a future shaped profoundly by both. This paper surveys how the interplay between corporations and biotechnology is represented in this emerging body of work to explore diverse facets of a common theme: the biotechnical subjection of human matter to market force.
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Notes
For a more comprehensive list of the topics covered by the President’s Council, please visit www.bioethics.gov.
Although Being Human is no longer available, copies of the other six publications may be ordered for free by emailing the President’s Council at info@bioethics.gov.
Jose Delgado was able to stop a charging bull by triggering its brain implant via remote control.
“For forty years between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) conducted an experiment on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis. These men, for the most part illiterate sharecroppers from one of the poorest counties in Alabama, were never told what disease they were suffering from or of its seriousness. Informed that they were being treated for ‘bad blood,’ their doctors had no intention of curing them of syphilis at all. The data for the experiment was to be collected from autopsies of the men, and they were thus deliberately left to degenerate under the ravages of tertiary syphilis—which can include tumors, heart disease, paralysis, blindness, insanity, and death (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0762136.html).
Eighteen-year-old Jesse Gelsinger was the subject of a trial study on gene therapy at the University of Pennsylvania. Jesse had a genetic defect, a deficiency in ornithine transcarbamylase, that prevented him from metabolizing ammonia. Shortly after researchers treated him with a dose of viruses carrying a corrective gene, Jesse died. His death halted the study and acted as a deterrent to other such research.
In the Minimata disaster, Chisso Corporation continued to poison the waters of Minimata, Japan with industrial pollutants despite knowledge of damage and death to local fishermen and their families.
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Stephanie Guerra teaches children’s literature, young adult fiction, and writing theory at Seattle University and heads a volunteer creative writing program at King County Jail. She is also working with the penal system in Washington to promote literacy for incarcerated parents and their children. Stephanie’s current research interests include censorship, biotechnology in young adult fiction, and depictions of incarcerated and troubled teens in young adult fiction. She resides in Seattle, Washington, with her husband and two children.
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Guerra, S. Colonizing Bodies: Corporate Power and Biotechnology in Young Adult Science Fiction. Child Lit Educ 40, 275–295 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-009-9086-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-009-9086-z