Just some background. I worked in two labs as a tech that worked on molecular genetics and plant physiology.
I had no idea at the time we were in the belly of the beast. Later I put it together when the Novartis controversy at UCB split Koshland labs with some faculty going one way, some the other. Novartis proposed to fund the labs on condition they got first crack at the potential patents. The deal was discontinued in a short couple of years when Novartis changed its mind. Novartis's main line of work was pharmaceuticals.
Novartis has a unit in Emeryville and one of their competitors, Bayer is in Berkeley.
It's no accident that Union of Concerned Scientist try to keep track of this industry much the way they follow the nuclear power industry. Like the nukes, these industries potential to do harm is just too great to take anything they say for granted. Like the nukes, they are just too close to their theoretical regulators, too tied into the political establishment and have too much money to spend on PR, political and legal manipulation. Like the nuke industries, climate change deniers, the drug happy crowd also deeply corrupt the science behind the work.
If they are caught at some wrong doing, they have enough money to string out litigation until the class action suit goes away or settles out of court The settlements are usually a tenth of what they should be and the class named gets maybe a couple of hundred dollars while a few dozen or more people were injured and or dead. One company subcontracted their human subject studies out to another company who ran the trials in Africa and killed some kids and made others seriously ill. Subcontracting human subject studies in the poorest populations in the world?
You can see the same situation in the big oil industries like BP and the Gulf disaster. You have to remember many of these Gulf communities are some of the poorest in the country.
Now its happening in Japan's nuclear power disaster. I just watched the first mutant bunny from Japan this morning and was going to post it. If it happens to rabbits, it will happen to humans.
Rabbits are a favorite test animal for preliminary human subject studies on new drugs and routinely consumed by the thousands as quality control animals for drugs already on the market.
In other words the mutant buddy was a preliminary test subject to see what will likely happen to humans. Here's RT's funny bunny:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iw2R7y65nFg