HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY & ETHICS
LEONARD A FREED
Zoology, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, Hawaii

BIOLOGICAL WEALTH & OTHER ESSAYS. By K R Dronamraju. River Edge (New Jersey): World Scientific. $46.00. xix + 186 p; ill.; index. ISBN: 981-02-4824-5. 2002.

The traditional colonial model of studies of natural history in developing countries is giving way to exploitation of DNA from indigenous plants and animals in those countries for intellectual property rights in the developed countries. Universities and government agencies (e.g., national wildlife refuges) are joining biotechnology firms in obtaining financial benefit from intellectual property rights. Biological Wealth deals with the host of issues biological wealth and intellectual property, global issues in biotechnology, culture and biodiversity, issues in DNA technology, and ethics based on asymmetries between developing and developed countries.

The fundamental problem recognized by Dronamraju is financial and ecological exploitation of developing countries by generating wealth in these countries from biological products extracted from them. How can indigenous people, to whom ownership of natural resources is either a foreign or a collective concept, partake in the wealth generated from biotechnological applications derived from their resources? How can indigenous people deal equitably with terminator genes in their genetically modified agricultural products, which force them to purchase the seeds for next year's crop from a foreign supplier? These are just two of scores of important questions in this book.

Biological Wealth also focuses on problems of science in developing countries. Dronamraju emphasizes lack of infrastructure and poverty as limiting the development of science, and criticizes an essay in Science. How can science develop when the drinking water is unsafe, roads and bridges are not maintained, and power outages are frequent? Dronamraju also takes to task a columnist in the Wall Street Journal who criticized the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences to Professor Amartya Sen, who championed the economics of the poor over the established economics of the rich.

This book consists of a large number of short essays that deal with the problems mentioned above. Those involved in entrepreneurial biotechnology can stand to learn the most about how to behave considerately and ethically. The author provides an example of a firm that is doing it right. Anyone with a desire for a more worldly view, shaped by science and fairness in the age of biotechnology, is sure to be startled and then convinced