Privatizing the Brain

Guest Post by Steven Miller

(This is the 1st of three guest blogs by Steven Miller about Obama’s BRAIN Initiative and Wall Street’s broader agenda of privatizing all aspects of medical treatment and research. In this post, Miller describes a parallel process in which Big Pharma used their relative monopoly on anti-retrovirals to exclude third world countries who were the most severely impacted by AIDS. )

On April 2, President Obama announced the next step in research of the human brain. This is the BRAIN Initiative – Brain Research through Advanced Neurotechnologies. The US government will finance research into the next generation of technology to map the human brain with $100 million in seed money. The next step is to develop new electrical, optical, computer-assisted technology to investigate how the brain works at the level of neurons to determine how they work and how they link up in neural networks.

The current level of brain research is already pretty amazing. Without invading the skull, scientists can map the areas of the brain, and even neural pathways, that respond to specific stimuli. For example, a given area of the brain will respond to stimulus by increasing the blood flow when it is being used. This area radiates more heat, which is easily detected.

When someone is shown a picture of their pet dog, for example, science can detect exactly which part of the brain activates. Scientists are thus able to detect which brain structures are involved when you dream, when you drive the car, when you fall in love or when you do your taxes. The brain, however, is perhaps the most complex thing in Nature. It has 10 billion cells that make 100 trillion connections. Getting down into the individual neurons and connections themselves offers the possibility of actually determining the structures of the mind, human personality and memory.

 These amazing advances will all be privatized. Corporations intend to claim parts of the brain as private property and sell access for a price. The privatization trend has been rampant in biology and medicine for 30 years.

Can You Own the Sun?

Polio epidemics swept the United States every summer in the early 1950s, terrifying families and entire communities. Sometimes whole birthday parties of kids would be affected, since bodily fluids in swimming pools could spread the virus. At the peak, in 1952, there were 58,000 new cases of children who were crippled or paralyzed.

 Dr Jonas Salk became an international hero in 1955 by proving that a killed virus could easily be made into medicine that could immunize people against the disease. By 1957, 100 million doses had been administered in the US. Treatment on a similar scale spread rapidly across the industrial world. In 2002, over 500 million children were immunized in almost 100 countries. Today the Americas are polio free and the disease is close to extinction around the world.

Salk was asked, in a television interview, who owned the patent. His famous response was, “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”

This response would be impossible today. Equally impossible would be the massive immunization rapid-response by the public. The single thing that prevents this sort of public health response is that corporations now control the development of science and medicine through patents. And, yes, they do intend to patent the sun!

 Fast-forward 40 years to the 1990s. Consider what happened with the next modern scourge, AIDS. After fighting the disease for 15 years, scientists had developed the cocktail of anti-viral drugs that would prolong life indefinitely by containing the virus. This time however the patents were all controlled by Big Pharma, the cartel of drug-makers like Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKlein. By that time, drugs now were the considered private property of corporations; thus they were protected by international treaties over intellectual property enforced by the United States.

 The public no longer had the right to use the anti-virals without paying billion-dollar corporations for them. As AIDS swept across Africa, India and Asia, these corporations, demonstrating once again their great concern for the improvement of humanity, offered them for sale for a mere $15,000 a year. They claimed that the drugs were expensive to manufacture. Besides, they reported, Africans could not use them effectively. Maybe that was because they lived on less than $2 a day.

In India, Dr Yusuf Hamied broke the patents and began manufacturing the anti-virals so easily that they were available for only $350 a year. Big Pharma responded with the true compassion that only corporate-persons can evince. They used their political power to force governments across the world to criminalize anyone who dared to distribute the inexpensive drugs. Some ten million people died as a result.

The response of the public to these police actions was so massive that the governments of Brazil and India were forced to declare that they would break the patents. Corporations could no longer control the distribution of generic AIDS drugs. Thousands of lives were saved. Big Pharma still works actively today to prevent the distribution of life-saving generic drugs today. (1) They innocently strive to maximize profit, even at the expense of human life.

 This is a terrible crime against humanity, one committed by corporate-persons against real persons. Such crime is inevitable when corporations control the resources of health, medicine, science, research and, in fact, any and all forms of technology.

NOTES

1) Democracy Now, “Fire in the Blood”, January 13, 2013

Steven Miller has taught science for 25 years in Oakland’s Flatland high schools. He has been actively engaged in public school reform since the early 1990s. When the state seized control of Oakland public schools in 2003, they immediately implemented policies of corporatization and privatization that are advocated by the Broad Institute. Since that time Steve has written extensively against the privatization of public education, water and other public resources. You can email him at nondog2@hotmail.com

photo credit: krischall via photopin cc

Crossposted at  Daily Censored