That came as a blow to Ishee, who told one outlet that it would be ‘easier to teach dog breeders CRISPR than … why pure breeding is a bad thing’. His view was that the genetic material of pedigree dogs is in no way ‘natural’ to begin with, and that CRISPR ofered a means of correcting biological errors which were the result of human intervention.
The FDA proposed treating the edited portion of an animal’s genome as equivalent to a veterinary drug. So just like a new pill, edited animals can’t be sold, or even given away. And, just as importantly, it is likely edited genomes may be subject to intellectual property rights and patent. Imagine the battle over Napster, the file-sharing P2P network at the turn of the millennium, and now apply it to biology. Even if information does want to be free – or at least wants to be consistently cheaper over time – that doesn’t matter when there are incumbent business and profit models to protect.
While there are justified safety concerns which need to be managed and regulated, turning edited DNA – including our own – into a commodity exclusively for profit, is entirely consistent with the logic of capitalism. As we have seen elsewhere, artificial scarcity has to be imposed in order to create a market – otherwise nobody can make a profit. Ishee ’s comments in response to the announcement perhaps ofer a sign, however, of what direct action might look like as the Third Disruption accelerates: ‘I feel like maybe the best thing is to just go ahead and produce the healthy animals and then just tell people … we cured this disease, but the FDA won’t let us.
Welcome to Elysium
Parallels can be drawn between David Ishee and his biohacking eforts in modern-day Mississippi and the film Elysium, set in 2154. In the latter, Earth has been ravaged by climate change and what appears to be a breakdown in the formal economy. As a result, the wealthy have departed for an ofworld colony named Elysium – a giant space-habitat orbiting the Earth. The diference in quality of life between its inhabitants and those left behind could not be more striking.
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