OK, so genes protect us from AIDS from the day we are born. They regulate AIDS development (which of course offers yet another promising new treatment direction) and treat everything from AIDS to cancer to alzheimer's [1,2].

Now we are told genes are responsible for protection from prion diseases, making us itch and teaching us to talk.

It could make one wonder how we ever managed to understand anything prior to the biotech industry. Now animals with human genes can churn out chemicals like little factories. But perhaps most astounding of all, genes are being investigated as a means of alterning our bodies so that they accept drugs better.

Scientists writing in Nature Medicine and Nature Structural Biology figured out why AZT is not as effective as it should be. The solution? Why, just alter the genetic makeup of the person taking the drug in order to make the drug work better. It is indeed Orwellian: if drugs can't be made effective, just alter the bodies into which they are dumped. That way even poor pharmaceuticals can be made effective and profitable.

When we turn our biological fate over to genes, be they genes of germs or genes in our cells, we surrender ourselves to that industry which profits from genetic manipulation. Further, it is another step along the path toward relinquishing control over our sickness and our health. Illness - that condition our bodies are evolutionarily designed to enter as it works to remove pathogens, toxins or other agents that disturb health - is taken over by "experts" who make high-tech claims to knowledge of who gets sick, why we get sick, and how to get better when we are.

And, oddly enough, finding all those answers generates billions in profit for some industry to "discover."

Modern Medicine does little more than generate profits from dissecting the diseases of Modern Society. Our bodies are capable of recovering from the vast majority of illnesses experienced in this society without the introduction of pills. Once we lose faith in this fact, regulation of our health will be nothing other than a market commodity.