Authors Lori B Andrews and Dorothy Nelkin, each intimately involved in the struggle to define the laws and issues of the biotech age, make a strong and clear case against the newfound rights of business interests to harvest our bodies and derive exclusive profit from the resulting products and processes. Though some of their arguments are unconvincing, on the whole the reader is left with a sense of urgency at the harm being done both to an unsuspecting population of health care consumers mined for new biological properties, and to humanity itself--perhaps expecting the same selflessness from the medical community that eradicated smallpox and smashed polio with little profit. Using stories of individuals injured or abused by the increasingly rapacious biotech industry and their own careful analyses of the changing intellectual property laws governing the mess, the authors warn of a dehumanised world unimaginable even a few decades ago. Whether we'll avoid the pitfalls of our new tech or simply cope with the results is a question for history. --Rob Lightner

Synopsis
In the biotechnology age, human body products have increased in value both as a source of information and as the raw material for new commercial products. Everyone from researchers and entrepreneurs to insurers, employers and law enforcement authorities have uses for our biological materials and genetic information - and have more access to them than most of us know. What does this mean for the trust patients have traditionally placed in their doctors? For the motives and goals of medical research? For personal privacy? For our very sense of identity? Body Bazaar is essential reading for everyone concerned about such questions in the biotechnology age - a time when the tissues and genes that are the essence of each person's individual humanity are becoming, in the words of the head of one pharmaceutical firm, "the currency of the future".