Review article
MEDICINE AND BIO–GENETIC ENGINEERING AS PARTS OF AN ANTI–ECOLOGIC AND ANTI–BIOLOGIC SOCIETY
Tomislav Markus
; Croatian Institute of History, Zagreb
Abstract
The author analyzes modern medicine and bio–engineering within the framework of the 20th century industrial civilization. Technical medicine has been developing for a century and a half as a part of general medicalization of health and transformation of the society into a global clinic and humans into eternal patients and the ill. Technical medicine is a part of a general process of collectivization and institutionalization. Within its framework the modern society has been transformed into a network of impersonal, technically rationalized institutions. Technical medicine attempts to transform illnesses and death into technically soluble problems. Bio–engineering, being closely connected with medicine, attempts to solve the problem by manipulating the genetic structure and guarantee the continuation of the materialist and consume–oriented life–style. Its main tasks are to find alternative sources of energy as an answer to the deepening fuel crisis, to develop new medicines against physical and mental illnesses, and to guarantee a transformation of human genetic features in order to adapt humans to the accelerating changes in the social and ecological environment. Not only that bio–engineering can be seen as a “dialogue of man with nature”, as molecular biologist would put it, but it has been the most drastic and massive attack of man on the whole living world on the Earth so far. The result is a continuous multiplication of problems and acceleration of the collapse.
Keywords
medicine; bio–engineering; industrial society; materialism and consumism; Bacon's programme; anti–biological and anti–ecological activities
Hrčak ID:
139512
URI
Publication date:
15.1.2001.
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