MARINA DEL REY, CA--The battle that will take place at the Biotechnology Industry Organization convention in Toronto next week will be between scientists who work to save human lives and environmentalists who have no regard for human life, said a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI).

ARI's David Holcberg lauded some of the recent achievements of the bio-tech industry:

         · Bacteria with human genes produce insulin that keeps millions of diabetics alive.
         · 'Golden rice,' genetically engineered to help increase vitamin A in humans, can prevent half a million children from becoming blind every year and another million from dying of vitamin A deficiency.
         · Genetically engineered potatoes, bananas and tomatoes with vaccines to fight a variety of diseases, including hepatitis B, have the potential to save millions of lives.

Despite the countless lives saved and still to be saved, environmentalists oppose genetic engineering:

         · From a member of Greenpeace: "We view genetically engineered foods as having the potential for the largest environmental disaster in human history."
         · From The Institute of Science in Society, a London-based environmentalist group: golden rice is a "most heinous abomination."
         · From The Organic Consumers Union: bio-engineered vaccines are "a very bad idea...causing unknown problems...with unknown consequences."

"Environmentalists," said Holcberg, "try to assure us that their purpose is to protect human life. But their consistent stand against a technology that saves millions of lives and can potentially eradicate disease from the face of the earth demonstrates the opposite. It reveals that they have no actual concern for human life. The bio-tech industry is engaged in a heroic battle and it deserves an unequivocal moral defense of its life-saving creations."

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ARI executive director Dr. Yaron Brook is available for interviews on this topic.  For further information, contact ARI Media Relations.  Phone: (949) 222-6550 ext. 213; fax (949) 222-6558; e-mail: interview@aynrand.org or visit ARI's Web site at: http://www.aynrand.org. 

 
The Ayn Rand Institute, an educational organization established in 1985, seeks to advance novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism and its principal tenets: reason, rational egoism and laissez-faire capitalism.