of cancer after learning that she had a faulty gene called b.r.c.a. one which sharply increases her risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer take a look. after angelina jolie revealed she had a double mastectomy people magazine is reporting this morning that jolie is now planning to undergo surgery to remove her ovaries because of an increased risk of cancer her openness over her health problems is producing what's being called the jolie effect and there jolie made a surprise announcement this morning the oscar winner is revealing she had a double mastectomy she announced the surgery in an op bit but the new york times it was performed earlier this year reaction today to the blazing announcement by enjoy alina jolie about her surgery to reduce her risk of cancer not angelina jolie got more coverage than being on the i.r.s. when she told the world should a double mastectomy to prevent breast cancer which runs in her family. indeed it was the story of the week across the corporate media no look i'm not going to sit

here and question whether or not this is a story worth covering i admire her greatly for having the courage to put vanity aside and use her celebrity status to help empower the four hundred thousand people who will die from breast cancer this year alone takes a lot for one of the world's biggest sex symbols to boldly state how her breasts do not define her femininity having said that the real issue here is something that goes much deeper than preventative msec timmy's or good motherhood those mutated genes found angelenos body called b.r.c.a. one and b.r.c.a. two are at the heart of a debate at the supreme court it's a case called association for molecular pathology versus myriad genetics and it's deliberating whether or not a company can patent parts of the human body or genome it's something that most of us probably haven't given much thought to get is an issue that calls into question the ethics and morality about patenting the life and what consequences that may have so to talk about this case and the implications on science and medicine and

joined now by sandra park a.c.l.u. staff attorney and representative for the plaintiffs in this case thank you so much standard for coming on and. thanks for having so what is the you currently arguing in the myriad genetics case what is the concern with patenting these genes. so we brought the first lawsuit in the united states challenging human genes it's estimated that twenty percent of our genes have been made and patent genes allows the patent holder to control all the testing that's done on the genes as well as any research that has died and we think that simply goes too far in giving monopolies to companies over the future of genetic research but didn't the supreme court already invalidate these sorts of patents under mayo versus promethea. mail actually dealt with a different kind of patent relating to medical methods there is no case yet decided by the court about whether human genes can be patented and we're expecting

a decision in june so even though these genes are current naturally in the body and this is why i think it's confusing for a lot of people they're like how can they patent something that's naturally occurring in our bodies myriad genetics invested in the research the technology the development in order to isolate these genes to research them which they say that entitles them to a patent because they developed this this research in order to isolate these genes and and study them why is that something that you disagree with. well i think it's important to note first that millions of dollars of federal tax money went into the search for these genes and there were teams around the world looking for these genes and simultaneously found b.r.c.a. two but i think the more fundamental argument that we're making is that a gene is a product of nature and so when myriad argues that they somehow invented something by just isolating the gene and remember all that isolation means is that you've

removed a gene from the cell in the body we think that argument is fundamentally flawed because you could make the same argument when a doctor removes a kidney from the body for transplant it's clear to us that the doctor did not invent the kidney by removing it it's still a human organ it's still a part of the body and it's still a product of nature let's talk about the monopoly issue which you mentioned i mean already this test costs three thousand dollars for people who want to pursue it in the u.s. and it's under almost exclusive ownership by myriad genetics if myriad wins this case how will it affect other scientists organizations wanting to research these genes. well we've already seen the problem with these patents where myriad has been able to shut down every other laboratory that has offered comprehensive testing of these genes even when those laboratories were using different testing methods and that's really our concern that allowing patents on the genes allows patton

a fundamental elements of our human body that we actually want scientists to use to further develop and to further do research on to create inventions that we do think are patent inventions such as new tests or new drugs and that's simply not what myriad has done here they've actually patented the gene itself so what do people do if they can't afford to test to know if they have pre-cancerous cells i mean it seems like i mean i guess if the innovation is able to go to other companies and people and scientists then it will be lower obviously the monopoly is causing this to be so expensive because it seems like this is only benefiting the people going to four to take this type of action in the first place. yes it's a big problem where there are patients that have family histories of breast and ovarian cancer or who have other risk factors for hereditary breast or ovarian cancer and cannot afford the test and that means they're deprived of a crucial piece of information about their own genetic risk for cancer and that's

an important piece of information for making medical decisions about how often you're going to get screened for cancer whether you're going to take prophylactic measures like angelina jolie did and many other decisions including you know family planning for ovarian cancer many people choose to remove their ovaries but if you haven't had kids yet it's a it's a serious issue about whether you want to take that step and when you want to take that step and knowing your genetic risk is really crucial to making that decision indeed it's ownership over your own lives i mean making decisions based on what's best for you and your body and you know we've seen the supreme court rule time and time again on the side of big business patenting life and like crop seeds so should we expect the current court to rule similarly on this case. i think the court has been very strong on this issue for over one hundred fifty years the court has said that products and laws of nature cannot be patented and so we're very hopeful that

they will apply that precedent to this case and invalidate the patents on human genes it seems like this is inevitably going to be used for corporations to patent i mean or at least is going to be attempted time and time again in other avenues i mean i guess where do we draw the line because it seems like this is a concept that could be taken very very far in a very dangerous direction sandra. yes and i think that is what really concerned the court in oral argument last month what you heard the justices asking the attorney for myriad about is where do we draw the line if you had patented the chromosome that was isolated from the body without the. ok or if you had been the first to remove a piece of the liver would that be ok and i think that they really work concerned that marriott's attorneys seem not to be drawing any sort of principled line where do we stop in terms of patterning parts of the human body and sandra just lost it

or up about thirty seconds to one is this case going to be determined this year. so we expect a decision by the end of june thank you so much sandra part a.c.l.u. staff attorney will be definitely following this important case very closely thanks for your time. thank you. so guys i want to share with you this awesome tweet from actor john q sachar said that my interview with noam chomsky is a must watch so you sacks advice and go watch it on here to dot com breaking the set stick around we'll be right back.

she good laboratory kirby it was easy to believe in the most sophisticated which doesn't give a darn about anything mission to teach religion why you should care about humans and. this is why you should watch only. the british style. market why not. find out what's really happening to the global economy with much stronger for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune into cars a report on. some of these traditional chili lines they've been

bred and developed and passed down from generation to. this is a total destruction of the culture of new mexico by telling them i mean this this is not going to impact the swelling in mexico whatever happens here. we're eating at about expire in the in the open a in all boarding and so forth. genetically engineered crops why do you think this country is full of obese and sick people because we have a crappy food system. choose your language. we could go into. some of. the fumes to consume shit to. chew through opinions that invigorating to. choose the stories that impact the. truth be access to truth.

seriously. let's. look like you want to tell her she's going to be like. oh. have you ever considered that the war on terror could just be

a symptom of an unavoidable quarter clash between islam and the west it's a theory called the clash of civilizations popularized by author samuel p. huntington in the ninety's that claims that there is an inherent cultural clash between the east and the west pitted against each other by default it's a concept that many opponents and academics have criticized over the years but one that raises very important questions about how we're seeing u.s. foreign policy a ball today and that's something that my next guest dr drawn trumbull or has studied extensively as a historian and research director at harvard law school while in boston over the weekend i had the opportunity to sit down with him in his office where i first asked him to break down the theory of the clash of civilizations take a look. in the early one nine hundred ninety s. samuel p. huntington wrote a very influential article for foreign affairs magazine and this was right after

the cold war of the early called war. the early end of the cold war where people were saying now that the soviet union is now breaking up the west doesn't have an enemy what are we going to do there was this fear and huntington talked about it a lot that the liberal democracies become flabby and decadent fall into a kind of crass commercialism and materialism and that you need to be sometimes have an enemy a proper enemy to get your society mobilized to fight for higher values and to. you know continue strength of your civilization and so the speculation became well the new enemy now that the cold war is over is going to be islam the history of. doing say france and the ottoman empire theory

of long stretches of history where western societies were able to work with islamic societies but that kind of gets brushed aside just to say we are deep down we hate each other and to some void this conflict is going to have to come to a head and there were a lot of ideologues that really got behind it especially who were fearful of the consequences of the end of the cold war when you hear the clash of civilizations being used as almost a justification for why these wars in the middle east are happening this is an almost a childlike dumbed down view of a battle that's much more complex about resources than geo political control we just had this testimony from the assistant. secretary of defense sheehan who was asked well how long is this war on terror going to go and he said well it will last

he says at least another ten to twenty years and many commentators said well we've already had this twelve years since nine eleven so that they're officially sort of saying that it's probably a thirty years war at least and i think the clash of civilization is very useful for that kind of thinking because it tells you that there is this a long term thing that's unceasing that's very hard to do and it makes it very hard for people to then talk about ways in which some of this can be wound down and part of it is the logic of the war on terrorism is your are constantly attacking people that leads to tremendous amounts of civilian casualties case can be made that in fact you know many more civilians are often being killed than suppose a terrorist and you're belding war and more means all along and so it just keeps

keeps it going many people look at the middle east and say they're centuries behind the western world they're so barbaric when you look at countries like egypt iran afghanistan and i mean mere decades ago they were much more progressive than they are today what do you think has caused this backwards trend the transformation was very very rapid but i think one thing that a lot of people don't don't appreciate sometimes is that a lot of the repression that was supported by the west that was designed to destroy a left secular. alternative many times and so that was knocked out of the way and then you know of course people they always tried to distance themselves from say the support for. extreme islam in afghanistan where they had this idea that we are going to support these taliban because this is going to be our way of sticking it to the soviets and so you know

that is sort of been now just distance and said well we had no responsibility for that there's always been a denial in the story about bin ladin you know there was a lot of efforts to build up this kind of very extreme islam sometimes with the support of the saudis as a way of fighting soviet communism and also opposing more left leaning forces in islamic societies and so you know when they got stronger and stronger you know later on i think think some of these western foreign policy observers started say oh well we had nothing to do at this this was just some thing that was just permanently part of their societies because there is a law mixed civilizations and there's always been this war like warm of is a lie they would say and they would try to frighten paul that this is you know

a permanent feature in those societies but you know it's not really you know the way those societies you know developed in the twentieth century many cases and so you know they don't want to talk so much about about the role of repression in the types of regimes that we gave great support to that ended up developing this kind of backlash against it i can't help but remember that famous photo hailing bin ladin as the anti soviet hero of the cold war and of course we all know what happened what that you discussed the search for a new cold war enemy how was that enemy constructed you did have a literature in the eighty's during the reagan year that there was. you know a. kind of terrorism network out there that was going to via a very dangerous force but i do think the clash of civilizations people they

really then tried to just link it to something that was inherent to islam and they really talk a reading of is alive to try to find any aspects of the koran in the defs to try to say these are the evidence of a structure of violence now many of us could take say the christian scriptures judeo christian bible and you can find areas where if you want to see a very unforgiving a merciless god you can find it if you take it out of the right tax out in course we see extremists christians who you know are sort of ideologues who without mercy you can find this i think and in a lot of world religions where. you know many of the world religions have great peaceful impulses that you can find but if you really want to find some of the

things that are you know ugly you can mock the things and find them and so i think there was a lot of effort you know to try to find this kind of interpretation of islam and not really try to find you know aspects of islam that have you know been in a more peaceful direction there was you know and that was a lot of huntington's effort to always say wherever muslims are islam has bloody borders they can't get along with people and many times that was done in a very decontextualized way not looking at situations sometimes where muslims were sometimes also minorities in societies where they were really under a lot of assault an attack. and it was sort of many times is blaming the victim and saying there is violence there it must be because muslims are there and that was

the you know way that it would be written about and we know that the u.s. foreign policy necessitates an enemy think here communists and terrorism what do you think the next enemy is going to be after the thirty year war on terror you see some theorists really looking into this question of what is going to happen with the united states and china because china seems to be the real global powerhouse in many ways. but i think when you do ask this question of an enemy i do think that is. a fundamental problem for liberal democracies that many of the great theoreticians of liberal democracy do have this deep seated worry about how do you have societal cohesion how do you mobilize societies for higher gauls if you don't have an enemy and obama to some extent is

not really broken with a lot of their. you know activities you know we have drone attacks going on at a much much greater rate than the previous government and republican government and there's a lot of continuity in the foreign policy if you really really really break it down and i think that's a hard thing for a lot of liberals to swallow when people say that you've also done a lot of research on the homogenization of culture the spread of american is in the through hollywood when you look at films like zero dark thirty argo films that perpetuate this clash between east and west would you say that hollywood is now a very effective propaganda tool for the establishment the issue was so. some people in the state department were afraid that hollywood out a certain amount of volved carroty and they were worried about that but at the end they decided no hollywood is

a great asset for the united states it's helping spread the american way it's helping perpetuate. the new goods coming off of our assembly lines people are seeing them in the movies there was an effort you know to then make a lot of fiercely anti communist movies during the one nine hundred fifty s. and on but overall i think that the main thinkers for us capitalism in the establishment institutions they still regard hollywood as a big asset for u.s. business and industry even though from time to time there's individual exemplars that they don't like there's a lot of complaint they feel that hollywood is not pro business and knopf and that that complaint comes out a lot even though hollywood i think many times when there is a criticism of business it's often the critique is that there's an evil doer in

that company and all that evil doer has to be replaced by a good person a nice person and then i think again it's very hard i think for hollywood to have a more systematic critique of the system why does this lead to the same outcomes over and over again that are against the interests of the people on the corporate domination of so much of the society in the culture and dr your research director at harvard of course one of most prestigious institutions in the country how would you say that harvard and other institutions like it perpetuate the same ruling class the same ruling elite and what's problematic about that you know once again you have to start asking yourself why is it that when say the reagan administration comes. the power there they were bragging we have twice as many harvard people as the kennedy administration. ready to serve the

most conservative regimes and the liberalism i often argue is not very liberal it's often it was very willing to cooperate with that with the cold war in the national security state and go along with that and many of them as accept most of the major assumptions of the. post nine eleven consensus that this war on terror is something that must continue on and on you know when you have the president of harvard at the three hundred seventy fifth anniversary welcomes henry kissinger back and there's just all these standing ovations in applause for this man you know harvard i think feels very comfortable with many of the leading architects of a foreign policy that's created this permanent war economy and this national security state and chomsky also said that propaganda is largely directed toward the

privileged thank you so much for your time thank you. guys that's it for today's show as always thanks for watching and thanks for your feedback always and i'll see you right back here tomorrow while i'll be breaking the set all over again. more news today violence is once again flared up. these are the images cold world you've been seeing from the streets of canada. trying to corporations to rule the day. please.

welcome to the truth out of sight but still on our minds from the still exceeds the norm let's try to live smarter with smartphones you never know what some people are hiding things can be sure to prove down to the molecular level learned that what the doctor ordered is often based on secrets under our skin let us shine the light on a kid in the world. only we've got the future of coverage. goodspeed . you.

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unfortunately doesn't give a darn about anything tim's mission to teach the creation of life to care about humans in war. this is why you should care only. plus. live. live live. live

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few. long done could be staged raids across the country so on so that gruesome murder of a british soldier but suspects were reportedly already not until summer season one is understood to be a twenty eight year old muslim claim but. and on the list of warning more spontaneous atomics calls by the rapid spread of radical islam in london's multi-ethnic suburbs all spurred by britain's military forays aboard. opened small local police stations and dozens of cars that set ablaze as the riots gripped stockholm for a force night finding out across this would accomplish. reinventing the war on terror obama prepares a major security were brown to take.