The point is that countries that are or were once formerly considered "missionary territory" are quickly jumping on the biotech bandwagon, including an embrace of manipulation of human embryos. The article’s focus is rather narrow: what are the missionaries saying about this? But there’s more to the article than that. In particular, I was wondering about the highlighted sentence below. If someone could elaborate that would be great:
The scope of these problems doesn’t change in other latitudes. In early March, after lively debates both in and out of the political arena, Brazil’s congress approved by a wide majority a bill on bio-security which permits both the production and the marketing of GMOs. This law also permits the use of stem cells from human embryos.
This development is doubly interesting because it’s indicative of what could become a wide-spread phenomenon in countries presently considered “backward.” With the more or less insouciant acceptance of highly-developed technology, these countries try to bridge the scientific and economic gap that separates them from the West. On the one hand, Brazil’s political choice is an attempt by the country – potentially one of the richest in the world – to bring its own agriculture and food industries in line with today’s production demands and international commercial challenges, by giving the green light to genetically modified soy and other GMOs. But on the other hand – and this is the very same law – this approval of new genetic technology goes so far as to include the very delicate area of experiments on humans. Naturally, this has provoked protests from the Catholic Church, a Church which in the public eye only looks after the landless or the minorities of African origin. In a message to the chamber of deputies, the Brazilian bishops criticized the use of embryos to harvest stem cells as “the signal of an anti-ethical attitude without precedents in the history of mankind.“
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