When it comes to fetal stem cell research, science fiction is inseparable from reality.

In the science fiction film Gattaca, actor Ethan Hawke plays a man attempting to fake the identity of a paralyzed genetically altered superhuman he cares for in order to become an astronaut, a profession denied people of his genetic caste.

New stem cell therapies that rely on fetal tissue promise miracle cure escapes. Those most likely to be able to afford these therapies will be restricted to a new wealthy disease free caste reminiscent of Gattaca.

Despite vague promises to cure disease and cancer for those who can pay, stem cell therapies cannot promise cures for the environmental source of these malignacies.

Our global economic system generates chemicals that have disrupted fundamental biological processes of plants and animals, unleashed epidemics of disease and cancer, and altered our climate in ways that puts our very survival in peril. This is what I call humanity’s environmental trade deficit.

Unfortunately, the environmental cause of disease plays little to no role in the modern medical industry. For modern medicine, the body is cured by attacking it with the very chemical, radiation and viruses that threaten our health in the first place.

Women, children and the ill are ground zero of the medical assault. Women with breast cancer like my departed mother are being bombarded with the very chemical and radiation that most likely contribute to their cancers in the first place. No doctor ever bothered to find out that my mother worked for a number of years at a military based with a Superfund site. Not a week goes by when there is news of yet another inadequately tested deadly medication being dumped into our national body by a criminally negligent self-regulated industry.

The public is becoming rapidly aware of the inherent contradiction of modern medicine’s blindness to the toxic wasteland that threatens us from inside and out. It is no accident that holistic healing methods such as eating organic food, using herbal remedies and practicing yoga are gaining in acceptance. Afterall, who would have ever imagined that Nike would be making yoga mat packs? Patience is wearing thin for so-called medicine that bruises our body in order to heal it.

Not so for modern industrial medicine.

Stem cell therapy is premised on the Cartesian worldview of the body as a machine composed of infinitely interchangeable parts. It is a move away from our growing awareness of the body as an integrated whole struggling to survive in a world rapidly being poisoned by the assault on the very ecosystems that sustain us. The irony escapes us that this same Cartesian view of the earth as a machine has brought about the global environmental state of emergency we now face.

Funding to solve proven solutions to these urgent ecological crises are being stolen to swell up the bottom line of the biotech industry, such as the much lauded $3 billion taxpayer funded stem cell slush fund in California.

The stem cell therapy industry is quiet about the mounting scientific studies alerting us to the role toxins play in triggering susceptible genetic conditions. For example, recent studies found that bisphenol A in plastic consumer items ranging from computers to toys and mercury in fish and vaccines can trigger autoimmune diseases such as lupus, arthritis and cancer.

If fetal stem cell therapy proves to be able to remove, replace or deactivate these “sleeper genes,” it promises to plunge us into a caste system much like the film Gattaca in which a select elite attempt to buy their way out of a lifetime of debilitating disease and life-threatening cancer.

In this not so science fiction future, access to stem cell therapy will become an issue of environmental justice restricting who can live their lives free of toxic induced disease based on the ability to pay. If it works.

The only thing that has been overlooked is that only a few hundred of nearly 80,000 toxic chemical currently in use have ever been tested. Those that can afford to pay in the future will not be protected from what they refused to pay for in the past—a clean environment protected by adequate testing, regulation and controls of the chemical industry. While the rest of the world moves toward banning the most dangerous chemicals under the new Basel Convention the US continues to allow the chemical industry to self-regulate itself.

Unfortunately, the only organized effort to ban stem cell research at the national level is by the religious right which ties the use of cloned fetal tissue to their campaign to undermine a woman’s right to make her own reproductive choices.

Progressives have been either silent about or complicit in promoting a Gattaca-like distopia ruled by a eugenic elite. Nearly all the critical voices that do exist denounce conflicts of interest while simultaneously embracing or remaining silent about the distopian promise of stem cell therapies for fear of being associated with the anti-choice right.

The one exception is an effort by Jeremy Rifkin and colleagues who successfully forced the US Patent Office to recently rule that human life cannot be patented. But that will provide little protection if the World Trade Organization continues to allow researchers to patent their genetically manipulated “products” abroad.

Considered a mere product, WTO rules would most likely allow the genetic manufacturing of a caste of disposable cloned slaves whose only reason for being is to clean up the toxic wastes that threaten the privileges of the eugenic elite.

Then it will be time for a new global anti-slavery movement to protect the freedom of those of us for whom there is no escape from our toxic legacy.

Robert Ovetz, PhD is an adjunct professor at The Art Institute of California at San Francisco

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Robert Ovetz, PhD is an adjunct instructor at The Art Institute of California-San Francisco and an international ocean advocate with the California based Sea Turtle Restoration Project.

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Source: An ENN Commentary