Massive Change Weekly Issue #20, Monday, May 30, 2006
“Now that we can do anything, what will we do?”
Welcome to Massive Change Weekly, an electronic newsletter sharing news about groundbreaking achievements in global design.
Sorry for the brief hiatus. Here’s a round-up of massive changes in progress:
“Genetically modified foods have caused no end of anxiety and distrust. But not genetically modified shirts. Why?
“Readers may imagine the reason is that there is no such thing as a genetically modified shirt, and they would be half right. The shirt genome has yet to be mapped, and the heritability of sleeve length is not widely accepted in either the textile or molecular biology community.
“That doesn’t mean there are no genes being fiddled with in the making of that oxford cloth button down. Genetically modified cotton, also known as Bt, or transgenic, cotton, is grown all over the world and is present in unknown numbers and styles of garments.
Check out the full story in the NY Times (you need to be a registered reader for the full text)
“A tiny biosciences company is developing a promising drug to fight diarrhea, a scourge among babies in the developing world, but it has made an astonishing number of powerful enemies because it grows the experimental drug in rice genetically engineered with a human gene.
“Environmental groups, corporate food interests and thousands of farmers across the country have succeeded in chasing Ventria Bioscience’s rice farms out of two states. And critics continue to complain that Ventria is recklessly plowing ahead with a mostly untested technology that threatens the safety of conventional crops grown for food.
“‘We just want them to go away,’ said Bob Papanos of the U.S. Rice Producers Association. ‘This little company could cause major problems.’
“Ventria, with 16 employees, practices ‘biopharming,’ the most contentious segment of agricultural biotechnology because its adherents essentially operate open-air drug factories by splicing human genes into crops to produce proteins that can be turned into medicines.”
Read the full article:
http://www.agbios.com/main.php?action=ShowNewsItem&id=7523
And read more about Ventria:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventria
Toffler’s publish new book
REVOLUTIONARY WEALTH
By Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler.
492 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95.
“For the Tofflers, ‘The Collapse of Hierarchy’ and ‘A Superabundance of Selves’ (to quote two section headings in Future Shock) weren’t the disturbing developments they were to appalled social critics like Daniel Bell in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism and Christopher Lasch in The Culture of Narcissism. The Tofflers believed that rampant technological, economic and cultural innovation was mainly a good thing, or at least potentially liberating for most of us once we learned how to deal with it. When the shock wore off, said the Tofflers, who elaborated their case in The Third Wave (1980) and Powershift (1990), we’d appreciate a richer, freer, groovier world.
“Now the Tofflers are again back from the near future. Their new book, Revolutionary Wealth, builds on the framework of their previous writings, so there’s a lot of talk about clashes among First Wave (agrarian), Second Wave (industrialized) and Third Wave (postindustrial, or “knowledge-based”) societies. They argue convincingly that we are on the verge of a post-scarcity world that will slash poverty and ‘unlock countless opportunities and new life trajectories,’ at least if we avoid the rapidly escalating risks to such progress.” - Robert Weingarten
Read the whole review in the NY Times
And check out the Toffler’s new website:
http://www.revolutionarywealth.com/
as well as the Future of Work blog:
http://www.thefutureofwork.net/blog/archives/000472.html
…which is also a pretty interesting blog all round.
