This entry was posted on Thursday, December 11th, 2008 at 9:42am and is filed under Food Production. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I’ve got an assignment for you: Go visit the website of the livestock cloning company, ViaGen. Watch the video. All of it.
Yes, I know it is propoganda. Of course it’s put together by the company.
But, those are real employees, real animals (lots of them cloned). And I believe, real caring and real passion.
It’s easy to paint technology with a scary brush. So often, we are left with the impression that horrible, unethical people who only care about money are the ones who are behind biotechnology. I used to be a University scientist and later, a biotech executive. I cared then just as much as I care now; about people, animals, environment, quality and agriculture.
Leave some room in your perceptions for the possibility that those working in the biotech industry do too.
January 7th, 2009 at 5:15pm
Thanks for posting this Sara. Actually that video was produced by the Austin Chamber of Commerce as they were highlighting biotech businesses in the Austin area and asked us if we’d like to participate. We liked how it came out and are allowed to use it on our website to let people see who we are. We also show that video at University job fairs.
And yes ALL of those people in the video are real actual ViaGen employees, not actors paid to look scientific and no it wasn’t scripted either.
As an employee of ViaGen one thing that continually ticks me off is those who are opponents of any and ALL forms of technology in agriculture trying to paint us and thus people like me as uncaring, bottom line, money grubbers. That’s not to say that of course the company would like to turn a profit, who doesn’t want that? But that’s not what motivates the people that I see in my office everyday and yes I do take it personally when I see the vitriol continually portrayed in the press and in the blog-o-sphere.
January 7th, 2009 at 9:54pm
Thanks for clarifying the source and the reality of the video.
I feel the same way about being in animal agriculture as you do about being in biotech. It is easy to paint an “industry” as being cold and unfeeling, and to forget that those industries are made up of individual people; many with strong convictions.