Donna Dickenson on Body Shopping

Why are you interested in medical ethics?

Thoreau isn’t writing a political tract, but rather a pithily written and often humorous personal account. He is probably the greatest English prose stylist of his day, if not of ours, not least because many of his central points are expressed as epigrams, aphorisms or parables. His thinking about commercialisation is also put in that fashion, with a fantastical metaphor of a farmer neighbour whom he met walking down the road, pushing his barn before him. It encapsulates Thoreau’s strong sense that the once independent American character was being simultaneously overloaded and undermined by acquisitiveness and consumerism.

Your next book, The Shock Doctrine, is also a critique of American society. Tell us about the book. 

It’s probably a bit predictable to choose her analysis of the Iraq war, but that is very telling. Klein argues that the war wasn’t caused just by what many critics saw as Bush’s monomania or Blair’s toadying. Nor was it merely a matter of ‘one-word answers’ like ‘oil’ or ‘Israel’. Instead, she sees the war as being about the deliberate destruction of the Iraqi economy and infrastructure so that Western firms could move in to win lucrative contracts and penetrate the closed economies of the Middle East. It was an entirely rational doctrine, she argues, the ‘shock doctrine’: just an evil one.

Your next book, Tissue Economies, is more directly about medical ethics. What does the book argue?

Waldby and Mitchell, like Naomi Klein, present a wide-ranging argument, which in their case applies to a number of areas in biotechnology.