Deadly Monopolies
  • Published: 15 October 2012
  • ISBN: 9780767931236
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 448
  • RRP: $35.00

Deadly Monopolies

The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself--And the Consequences for Your Health and Our Medical Future

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From the award-winning author of Medical Apartheid, an exposé of the rush to own and exploit the raw materials of life--including yours.

From the award-winning author of Medical Apartheid, an exposé of the rush to own and exploit the raw materials of life—including yours.
 
Think your body is your own to control and dispose of as you wish? Think again. The United States Patent Office has granted at least 40,000 patents on genes controlling the most basic processes of human life, and more are pending. If you undergo surgery in many hospitals you must sign away ownership rights to your excised tissues, even if they turn out to have medical and fiscal value. Life itself is rapidly becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of the medical-industrial complex.
 
Deadly Monopolies is a powerful, disturbing, and deeply researched book that illuminates this “life patent” gold rush and its harmful, and even lethal, consequences for public health. Like the bestselling The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, it reveals in shocking detail just how far the profit motive has encroached in colonizing human life and compromising medical ethics.
  • Published: 15 October 2012
  • ISBN: 9780767931236
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 448
  • RRP: $35.00
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About the author

Harriet A. Washington

HARRIET A. WASHINGTON has been a fellow in ethics at the Harvard Medical School, a fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health, and a senior research scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University. As a journalist and editor, she has worked for USA Today and several other publications, been a Knight Fellow at Stanford University and has written for such academic forums as the Harvard Public Health Review and The New England Journal of Medicine. She is the recipient of several prestigious awards for her work. Washington lives in New York City.

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Praise for Deadly Monopolies

  • COVER QUOTE: "An important book....Challenge[s] readers to see the world differently....Deadly Monopolies is an extraordinary achievement." --The American Prospect
  • "A searing look at the medical-industrial complex....Cogently argues that there are opportunities to reinstate transparency, collaboration and altruism in drug development and disbursement....A gripping, revelatory account." --Kirkus Reviews (starred)