With recombinant DNA technology in the hands of industry – aided by academic scientists – we can expect continued exposure to biological risks, and continued benefits to private interests at public expense. As David Suzuki, a geneticist, wrote three years ago, "What could be more explosive than the application in...
Tag - cancer
For nearly a decade a major battle has been waged over conditions in coke plants. While the steel industry has resisted clean-up efforts tooth and nail, the United Steel Workers of America (USWA), prodded by rank-and-file coke oven workers, has won definite improvements in conditions in coke plants. Still, most plants...
Until chemical manufacturers are taken to task for supplying unsuspecting workers and other purchasers with chemical time bombs, we will all be relying, to our peril, on a philosophy roughly the equivalent of “Better Profits, But Often Worse Living, Through Chemistry.” Even before the question arises of how to control...
There is much more profit in finding a cure for cancer than in preventing the disease. Industry tries to manipulate cancer prevention into a case of the environmentalists against the workers; just as nuclear power, uranium mining, automobile emissions standards, and too many others have been previously manipulated...
In recent years labor unions have become more and more interested in problems in the work environment. In Denmark unions have initiated research into social and medical problems related to work. Their goal has been to make the workplace safe for their members and to track down work-related health hazards and illness...
The Politics of Cancer is his contribution to the debate over the future of the environmental health movement. In it he has pulled together a monumental amount of information on specific carcinogens, on the scientific background to cancer, and on the “scientific” and “non-scientific” opposition to regulation. He...
Cancer research in this country has become a bureaucracy and an industry, and certain avenues of research languish because of this. Cancer prevention and its research are not in the interests of the medical establishment, and cause contradictions in our economic system. This article will examine the broad issue of...
As the concern about the risks of modern technology to people and the environment has been translated into legislation, a basic idea has emerged - that the best way to evaluate such a risk is to compare it with the associated benefits. This is known as risk/benefit assessment.
Cancer is both a scientific and a political issue. It is a scientific issue because it is a heavily researched disease — one whose most basic characteristics are still being uncovered and one about which honest and less-than-honest differences of opinion exist among scientists. It is fundamentally a political issue...
Even though federal inspectors knew in the early afternoon of Wednesday, March 28 that the uranium core in the reactor at Three Mile Island (3MI) was seriously damaged, two days went by before news of the danger was made public.