Could a company patent a change to your DNA? Del Bigtree asks where ownership of modified biology might lead if the subject were a person rather than a crop. It's a question about consent, corporate power, and who gets to draw the line.
Del is an Emmy-winning producer, host of The HighWire, and founder of the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN). The FDA proposed releasing Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine approval records at a minimum of 500 pages a month. The group seeking the records calculated that, at that pace, full disclosure would take at least 75 years. Aaron Siri, ICAN's lead attorney, represented that group, and a federal judge ordered the FDA to release 55,000 pages every 30 days. The resulting documents put trial and safety information, including adverse-event reports, in public view. Del argues the FDA had been shielding Pfizer from scrutiny. For him, people should be able to see what officials saw when they made a decision affecting millions.
What makes someone willing to put his name behind unpopular questions? Tab is curious about the person behind the public figure, including Del's years in television, the underdog stories he loves, and his perspective on corporate influence over wheat, glyphosate, and farming. They also get into what AI might do to the first jobs where creative people learn by doing.
That drive to see the underlying evidence also shapes Del's film An Inconvenient Study. He describes an unpublished study, a recorded dinner with one of its researchers, and the questions he believes the film leaves for the public to consider. The subjects range widely, but Del keeps coming back to the same demand: let people see the evidence for themselves.
