Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
keeping prices high and using trade sanctions to protect patent treaties
that give them a monopoly on life-saving drugs.
12
By mid-April, support
for the South African revolution had become widespread, including the
European Union, the World Health Organization, and the National AIDS
Council of France. On April 19, the thirty-nine drug companies behind
the case dropped their suit. In June, the United Nations's “Declaration
of Commitment on HIV-AIDS” endorsed the proposal of UN Secretary
General Kofi Annan to establish a worldwide $7-10 billion fund to
prevent and treat AIDS and other diseases, through a variety of social
measures.
13
At its November 2001 summit in Doha, Qatar, the WTO
reacted to international pressure by adapting its trade policies to allow
members more latitude in determining when to permit the manufacture
of generics. Meanwhile, countries such as Thailand and Brazil have
demonstrated that local efforts to promote effective use of AIDS drugs
can succeed even in very poor populations with little health care access.
Brazil's very successful national program of clinics and drug distribution
has managed to attain—even among very sick, uneducated, and impov-
erished patients—a level of compliance with the demanding AIDS treat-
ment regime that approaches that of the United States.
14
What this case suggests for moral analysis is that genetic engineering
is highly likely in the immediate future to lead to egregious injustices that
can be identified quite well without any new conceptions of human
nature, and that representatives of vastly different cultures can agree
to address. If there are relevant challenges here to our present notions
of human existence, they derive not from genetics as such but the
vastly heightened communication and transportation technologies that
magnify and intensify human relationships at the global level, creating
the opportunities for global investment, production, and marketing of
which the transnational biotech firms are so quick to take advantage.
Social, ethical, and policy analysts will be remiss if we do not target the
national, international, and global institutions through which genetic
engineering in all its forms is being developed and deployed. Possible
challenges to our philosophical categories aside, we are confronted here
with a human crisis of significant proportions—one that may or may not
be novel on the world historical scene, but that is self-evidently grave all
the same.
