When Orwell wrote his most famous novel, which happened to be the most emblematic of dramatic past century, he was not writing about Soviet Union and Stalin. He was basically writing a dystopia about Britain, the ruined Britain of Churchill and Lord Beveridge, a desperate country ruled now by conservative nihilism, social security services and the ideology of iron curtain and cold war. Orwell gave... 

An Australian court has ruled in favor of allowing a company to patent a human gene. Concerns have been voiced that allowing a company to monopolize genes will turn the human body into a commodity, and will adversely affect healthcare. The judge argued the act of removing a specific gene from the body and isolating it made it into a product “of new manufacture” and therefore open to be patented,...