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First-Ever Human-Made Life Form

Patenting Pandora's Bug
Goodbye, Dolly...Hello, Synthia!
J. Craig Venter Institute Seeks Monopoly Patents on the World's First-Ever Human-Made Life Form
News ReleaseETC Group
7 June 2007

ETC Group Will Challenge Patents on "Synthia" - Original Syn Organism Created in Laboratory



Ten years after Dolly the cloned sheep made her stunning debut, the J. Craig Venter Institute is applying for a patent on a new biological bombshell - the world's first-ever human-made species. The novel bacterium is made entirely with synthetic DNA in the laboratory.

The Venter Institute - named for its founder and CEO, J. Craig Venter, the scientist who led the private sector race to map the Human Genome - is applying for worldwide patents on what they refer to as "Mycoplasma laboratorium." In the tradition of 'Dolly,' ETC has nicknamed this synthetic organism (or 'syn') 'Synthia.'
"Synthia may not be as cuddly as a cloned lamb, but we believe this is a much bigger deal," explains Jim Thomas of ETC Group, a civil society organization that is calling on the world's patent offices to reject the applications. "These monopoly claims signal the start of a high-stakes commercial race to synthesize and privatize synthetic life forms. Will Venter's company become the 'Microbesoft' of synthetic biology?" asks Jim Thomas.

"For the first time, God has competition," adds Pat Mooney of ETC Group. "Venter and his colleagues have breached a societal boundary, and the public hasn't even had a chance to debate the far-reaching social, ethical and environmental implications of synthetic life," said Mooney.

In Vivo, In Vitro, In-Venter? Published on May 31, 2007, the Venter Institute's US Patent application (number 20070122826) claims exclusive ownership of a set of essential genes and a synthetic "free-living organism that can grow and replicate" that is made using those genes. The Venter Institute has also filed an international patent application at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO number WO2007047148, published April 27, 2007) which names more than 100 countries where it may seek monopoly patents.

Pandora pending: Patent experts consulted by ETC Group indicate that, based on the language used in the application, the Venter Institute researchers had probably not achieved a fully-functioning organism at the time of the filing (October 12, 2006).

"It has been eight months since the Institute applied for its patents, so we don't know how much progress they've made, whether there is a scientific paper in press or how imminent the first synthetic species is," said Pat Mooney of ETC Group. "We've been hearing for more than two years now that Venter is on the verge of announcing the birth of a new bacterium. Many people think Venter's company has the scientific expertise to do the job," said Mooney.

Venter's Institute claims that its stripped-down microbe could be the key to cheap energy production. The patent application claims any version of "Synthia" that can make ethanol or hydrogen. Since the research was partially funded by the US Department of Energy, the US government will hold "certain rights" to the patent, if approved.

"It's purely speculation and hype that syns [synthetic living organisms] will be used to ameliorate climate change by producing cheap ethanol or hydrogen," said Jim Thomas. "The same minimal microbe could be harnessed to build a virulent pathogen that could pose grave threats to people and the planet," he said.

"Synthetic biologists have already assembled the poliovirus from off-the-shelf DNA, a feat that its constructor called 'a giant wake up call' because of the biowarfare implications. Syns are being hyped as a green, climate-change solution in order to deflect concerns that they could be used as bioweapons," adds Silvia Ribeiro of ETC Group.

The patent application is also a wake-up call to synthetic biologists who are advocating for "open source" biology - the idea that the fundamental tools and components of synthetic biology should be freely accessible to researchers. In the June 4 issue of Newsweek Craig Venter boasts, "If we made an organism that produced fuel, that could be the first billion- or trillion-dollar organism. We would definitely patent that whole process." In 2005, Venter founded Synthetic Genomics, Inc. to commercialize synthetic microbes for use in energy, agriculture and climate change remediation.

Syn of Omission? Synthetic biologists may also be dismayed to learn that Synthia is being patented for what it is not. The patent application explains that the inventors arrived at their minimal genome by determining which genes are essential and which are not. Remarkably, their patent application claims any synthetically-constructed organism that lacks at least 55 of 101 genes that they've determined are non-essential. "All synthetic biologists developing functionalized microbes are going to have to pay close attention to the claim on a 'non-essential' set of genes. If someone creates another bug that lacks some of the same genes that Synthia lacks, will the Venter Institute sue them for infringing its patent?" asks Kathy Jo Wetter of ETC Group.

Action Needed: Before syns are allowed to go forward, society must debate whether they are socially acceptable or desirable: How could their accidental release into the environment be prevented or the effects of their intentional release be evaluated? Who will control them, and how? How will research be regulated? In 2006 a coalition of 38 civil society organizations called on synthetic biologists to withdraw proposals for self-governance of the technology.

Today, ETC Group is writing to Dr. J. Craig Venter, CEO of the J. Craig Venter Institute, asking him to withdraw the Institute's patent applications filed at the U.S. PTO and WIPO, pending a full public debate over the implications of creating synthetic life forms.

"We don't want to engage in a long-term legal strategy to slap down bad patents. These patents must be struck down before they're issued," said ETC Group's Hope Shand. Last month, ETC Group won its 13-year legal challenge when the European Patent Office revoked Monsanto's species-wide soybean patent.

ETC is also writing to WIPO and the U.S. PTO, asking them to reject the patent on the grounds that it is contrary to ordre public (public morality and safety). Later this month ETC Group will attend Synthetic Biology 3.0 (an international conference of synthetic biologists) in Zürich, Switzerland June 24-26 where it will call upon scientists to join in a global dialogue on synthetic biology. ETC will organize meetings with governments and civil society during the upcoming scientific subcommittee meetings of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Paris, July 2-6, in order to discuss the implications of the creation of synthetic life forms for the Biodiversity Convention and for its protocol on biosafety. ETC Group will convene a global meeting of civil society actors on this and related issues within the next year.
http://tinyurl.com/2aqbq7

"Psychology of evil" professor delivers final Stanford lecture
By RACHEL KONRAD, Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, March 7, 2007

The retiring psychology professor who ran the famed Stanford Prison Experiment savagely criticized the Bush administration's War on Terror Wednesday and said senior government officials should be tried for crimes against humanity.

In his final lecture at Stanford University, Philip Zimbardo said abuses committed by Army reservists at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison weren't isolated incidents by rogue soldiers. Rather, sadism was the inevitable result of U.S. government policies that condone brutality toward enemies, he said.

Individual military personnel — those who stripped prisoners and leashed them like dogs — are only as culpable as the people who created the overall environment in which the soldiers operated, Zimbardo told undergraduates enrolled in Introductory Psychology.

"Good American soldiers were corrupted by the bad barrel in which they too were imprisoned," said Zimbardo, 73. "Those barrels were designed, crafted, maintained and mismanaged by the bad barrel makers, from the top down in the military and civilian Bush administration."

The professor blasted President Bush, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other senior officials who said that al-Qaida and Taliban captives would be considered "unlawful combatants" rather than "prisoners of war," a designation that would invoke the Geneva Convention.

He said those officials "should be tried for the crimes against humanity."

Past president of the American Psychology Association, Zimbardo is best known as the author of 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, in which 24 male college students assumed the roles of prison guards and prisoners for $15 per day.

Participants — who had no criminal records and seemed psychologically "normal" when selected — flipped coins to determine who would be a guard and who'd be a prisoner. By day two, guards were going far beyond keeping prisoners behind bars: They stripped prisoners naked, cloaked their heads with paper bags, shaved prisoners' hair and dressed them in frilly smocks.

The two-week experiment had to be canceled after six days because the guards became dangerously sadistic. At least five prisoners had nervous breakdowns — crying, screaming, begging for release from the makeshift dungeon on campus.

Decades later, Zimbardo applied his analysis to American soldiers at Abu Ghraib. He testified as an expert witness in the court martial of Staff Sgt. Ivan "Chip" Frederick II, the highest-ranking officer implicated in the scandal.

Frederick received a maximum eight-year prison term for abusing and humiliating detainees. He was stripped of nine medals of honor and 22 years of retirement pay.

Zimbardo — who spent months interviewing Frederick and his friends and relatives, and poring over his work history and personal background — argued that his sentence should be lessened.

Based on academic research, Zimbardo said, very few people could resist the situational pressures of Abu Ghraib — particularly Army reservists, themselves subject to hazing and abuse by active duty soldiers.

"There's only one rung lower than reservists, and that's the detainees," Zimbardo said while flashing dozens of "trophy photos" of Iraqi prisoners in naked piles, being menaced by snarling German shepherds, covered in blood, or with their eyes missing.

Zimbardo, an unusual icon of both academia and pop culture also starred in the 2002 Discovery Channel reality show "The Human Zoo" and the PBS series "Discovering Psychology."

On Wednesday, he displayed a grainy, 1971 photo of Stanford's mock prisoners with bags over their heads, guards looking on casually — then switched to an eerily similar digital photo taken in 2003 or 2004 by one of the Abu Ghraib guards, with people in nearly identical formation and cloaks as the Stanford snapshot.

Bush characterized the abuse as an aberration. Some high-ranking military officials insisted that individuals — not Zimbardo's amorphous "environment" — had to be held accountable.

The reactions still sting the professor.

"I gave the situational view, and of course the military totally rejects it," Zimbardo said.

The anti-war activist emphasized that his analysis wasn't a license to engage in wickedness. Zimbardo said he was providing context to understand people like Frederick, who helped place wires on a detainee's hands and told him he would be electrocuted if he fell while standing on a box.

"The dialectic of human nature is good vs. evil," said Zimbardo, whose upcoming book, "The Lucifer Effect," summarizes his research.

Stanford professor Benoit Monin called Zimbardo — a child of Sicilian immigrants who grew up in the Bronx in the 1940s — "godfather" of academic psychologists.

"He's been an inspiring role model," Monin said as Zimbardo flashed a devilish grin and blasted the Rolling Stones'"Sympathy for the Devil" throughout the auditorium.
On the Net Stanford Prison Experiment: www.prisonexp.org
http://tinyurl.com/yrrcql



The Psychology of Evil
Fall 2000 issue of Eye on Psi Chi (Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 16-19)
by Philip Zimbardo - Stanford University Distinguished Lectures/Special Topics

Our topic today is an ugly one, one that we all hate to think about, to read about, to listen to. It is Evil. It is not pleasant to think about the nature of evil, of collective violence, of genocide, ethnic cleansing, mass rape, brutal tortures, and bestial acts of human against human that challenge our basic conception of human nature.
From early Christian history and the personification of Lucifer as the embodiment of evil, the dispositional analysis of evil has focused analytical attention on identifying those individuals who are evil by nature, and indeed there are some people who have directed collective violence, such as Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin, and Pol Pot. But those evil men are dead, yet evil continues.
It is more profitable, I believe, for us to focus our analytical energies on understanding their followers--why they killed for their leaders, or why, once they started the killing, their leaders became irrelevant, and that once the machinery of mass murder had been installed and lubricated, it required only persistent dedication to one's job and the knowledge that it is being executed effectively. We don't need evil demons for those deeds, only compliant workers or willing soldiers.
What is that line, that cosmic boundary, that one crosses to go from being a good person, a dutiful citizen, to a mass murderer with no conscience for evil deeds and no remorse for destroying human lives? And how is this line maintained?



What would it take for you to slide across it? We want to believe it is impermeable, with us here forever and them over there permanently, when in fact, that line is permeable--we good ones could become those bad ones.
My modest task is to outline some of the psychological processes that I believe are involved in human evil, more specifically, to share with you some ideas I have about the social psychological strategies and tactics that can facilitate the transformation of good, or at least ordinary, people into monsters, who are perpetrators of evil. I try to counteract the fundamental attribution error, the human tendency to overemphasize the dispositional while simultaneously underplaying the situational. I do so by demonstrating that seemingly trivial aspects of social situations can influence our behavior in profound ways, more so than we can imagine or give credit for--in the extreme--that can make us do the unimaginable.
Imagine a traitor is sentenced to death by firing squad and the government wants to recruit his peers, civilians, to shoot him. Few volunteer. If, however, they add a condition that only one of six guns will have a real bullet in the chamber, thus each gun would have only a small likelihood of being the lethal weapon, typically more volunteer. Why? Employing the tactic of diffusion of responsibility greases that line, and some good people are ready to slide across the boundary, become killers for the state.

One Principle for Line Bending, More?

Indeed there are many situational variables that subtly change key elements of the behavioral space and shift the behavioral dynamics away from standard operating procedures toward novel relationships and contingencies for which the actor does not have a prepared script to guide behavior down familiar paths--and so becomes more vulnerable to the demands of the immediately present behavioral context. Let's see what this means in four experiments.

Obedience to Authority

Stanley Milgram's Jewish heritage contributed to his intellectual and personal concern for finding an answer to the question: "If Hitler asked you, would you execute a stranger?" Despite cultural differences, historical-setting differences, and the absence of the charismatic power of Adolf Hitler, could it be demonstrated that thousands of us could be led down the same path as them, to inflict extreme harm on another human being? How could an experimental research paradigm provide answers to such vital questions?
Milgram recruited more than 1,000 participants from all walks of life to be a part of his studies. They would arrive individually in the lab and be told they were helping psychological science to find new ways to improve memory through punishment and thereby help in the education processes (Milgram, 1974).
Teacher, the role assigned to the participant, helps the Experimenter, who is wearing the white lab coat, symbolic of his status, to connect the Learner, a lovable middle-aged man, to the electrical shock apparatus; the victim is in an adjacent room. On the first trials, learning is going well, the word associates are being recalled, and Teacher says, "Good, fine."
But then the Learner starts making errors and punishment begins, first small, then ever escalating. As it does, the Learner begins complaining, then yelling and screaming. The Teacher is upset, having never imagined it would come to this. Turning to the Experimenter, Teacher dissents, indicating he or she does not want to continue, which is cast aside as the Teacher is reminded of the contract agreed to previously. More shock, more yelling, complaining of a heart condition, and insisting he wants to quit. "Who will be responsible if something bad happens in there to the Learner, Sir?" asks the Teacher. "I will; please continue, Teacher." At 375 volts the Learner screams, there is a loud thud, and then only silence from the shock chamber thereafter. Teacher is now really distressed (the women often cry, the men wince), says the experiment should be terminated because the Learner has stopped responding.
Not so easy. "Remember the rules," reminds the Experimenter, "Failure to respond is an error, and all errors must be punished immediately with the appropriate level of reaction, Teacher." And there are five more higher levels possible to the extreme of 450 volts.
Before starting his research, Milgram invited 40 psychiatrists to predict the percentage and type of person who would indeed go all the way in this study that he described to them in detail. In their collective wisdom based on their medical training in dispositional, individualistic analysis, they concluded that fewer than 1% of the Teacher - Participants would go all the way, and they would be the sadists.
So the psychiatrists were all wrong; everyone's predictions were all wrong. Not 1% compliance, but 65% compliance--two thirds of the subjects went all the way up to the final level. That quantification of evil went as high as 90% or down to 10% compliance across 18 studies in Milgram's research program--each study varying one aspect of the social situation.
So what is the answer, that my friend and New York High School classmate, Stanley Milgram, found to his initial question? Yes, sadly, by exploiting our deeply ingrained learned behavioral patterns of obedience, ordinary people could be seduced, initiated into behaving in ways that might lead to killing innocent victims.
Let me outline the lessons I think we should take to heart from this experiment, which help us to understand some fundamental process in making that line between good and evil more permeable:

- Start with an ideology (justifying beliefs for actions).
- Use authority to legitimate that ideology.
- Give people desirable roles to play with meaningful status.
- Have rules that channel behavioral options.
- Employ semantic distortion to disguise truth (help = hurt).
- Arrange for contractual agreement with the game rules before the game begins.
- Make situation give permission to engage in usually taboo acts.
- Make initial harmful act minimal, minor, trivial.
- Enable subsequent acts to escalate only gradually, minimally, but their cumulative impact can be deadly.
- Displace responsibility for consequences on authority or others.
- Get actors involved in action, in technology, in details, without time to think through the meaning of their actions.
- Don't allow usual forms of dissent to work; undercut them so dissent does not lead to disobedience.
- Put actors in novel setting, without familiar referents.
- Have authority transform gradually from just to unjust.
- Give no training in how to challenge unjust authority.
- Do not provide apparent means for exiting the situation.

Deindividuation

In much evil in the world there is no strong leader always present insisting that you must go on to do evil; that would be inefficient. Instead, the leader creates conditions that facilitate evil in his absence, conditions of deindividuation:

- Take away people's sense of uniqueness and individuality, because that encourages spontaneity, rebelliousness, and independence.
- Do so by submerging them in groups.
- Put them in uniforms.
- Disguise them with hoods or masks.

Can we demonstrate experimentally that making people feel anonymous will facilitate their crossing that line over to the evil side?
To go from that imagined reality to behavioral reality, I did a series of experiments on the concept of deindividuation (Zimbardo, 1970), in which college students' identities were concealed in a small-group setting, their names were replaced by numbers, their clothing covered with baggy lab coats, and their faces covered by hoods, or masks. Their task was to shock other participants who were allegedly in a related experiment on the effects of stress on creativity; these other participants tried to be creative while being stressed by these random shocks that the members of the observing group were administering to them. In the first study,
I stacked the cards against an easy outcome by having groups of women be the agents of pain for other women who were their victims. Later studies used males and military personnel, with comparable results. Those in a deindividuated state delivered twice as much shock as controls who were individuated.

Dehumanization

My colleague, Albert Bandura, and his students continued this line of research by extending the basic paradigm here to study the minimal conditions necessary to create dehumanization (Bandura, Underwood, & Fromson, 1975). What they manipulated was only the actors' perception of their victims--no authority pressures, no induced anonymity. A group of college students expected to help train another group of students from a nearby college by collectively shocking them when they erred on the task.
Just as the study was about to begin, the participants overhead the assistant tell the experimenter one of three phrases--Neutral: "The subjects from the other school are here." Humanized: "The subjects from the other school are here; they seem 'nice.'" Dehumanized: "The subjects from the other school are here, they seem like 'animals.'" Mind you, they never saw those other students, or heard anything directly from them, it is only this label that they had to go on in imaging what they were like.
On trial one, the manipulation failed to have a differential effect on their aggression, and had the researchers ended the study there, we would conclude that dehumanizing labels have no behavioral impact, but as the study wore on, it had a major impact. The boys, who imagined their victims as "animals," progressively elevated their shock levels over each trial after the first, significantly more than the neutral control. Humanizing labels helped to reduce the aggression significantly below the level of the neutral control.
When the participants were interviewed subsequently about why they behaved as they did, what the researchers found was that the experimental condition enabled them to become morally disengaged, to activate a set of psychological mechanisms that minimized the evil of their deeds, while justifying it in a variety of ways. So a one-word label can create a stereotype of the victim, of the enemy, that also lowers the height of that line between good and evil and enables more good people to cross over and become perpetrators.
The external validity of this construct has been demonstrated by the lynching and burning alive of untold numbers of Black men in the U.S., usually based on fears of their sexual conquest of White women, facilitated by the dehumanizing label of "nigger."

Stanford Prison Experiment

What happens when we aggregate many of these processes that contribute to the making of perpetrators: dehumanize victims, deindividuate potential perpetrators, put them in a new strange, anonymous environment, and give the perpetrators total power and render the victims powerless? The answer is: the Stanford Prison Experiment, which contains further lessons in the transformation of good people into evil perpetrators (Haney, Banks, & Zimbardo, 1973; Zimbardo, Haney, Banks, & Jaffe, 1973). In this study, a group of ordinary college students were divided arbitrarily into "prisoners" and "guards." Hidden cameras captured what happened: the "guards" became more sadistic, devising cruel mental tortures, while the "prisoners" either broke down or succumbed in cowed and mindless obedience. I had to end this 2-week study after only 6 days because it had become too real, too volatile. [Editor's note: The website www.prisonexp.org (Zimbardo, 1999), on which the photograph above appears, offers an Internet slide show about this experiment.]

Violence of War

We have seen how social psychologists have isolated variables that can contribute to the creation of perpetrators, but how do leaders of nations do it? How do national policies and agencies do it to transform idealistic, innocent children into those who hate other people enough to want them all to cease to exist, to exterminate them, to eliminate them and their very memory from the face of the earth forever? Briefly, it involves agents and agencies of socialization, propaganda, and education.
Socialization. Socialization means that parents and adult caretakers shape the values and ideas of the next generation. It is the basic means of civilizing children, of transmitting the lessons of the past to the current generation, of modeling what the culture says is the right way to behave in order to be a good person. When parents become agents of the state whose agenda includes learning to hate select others, and in doing so provide compelling reasons and examples for their children to believe in and emulate, that is one powerful way for ruling elites to spread their ideals and political agendas across generations to create a youth that will fight and die for their cause.
Propaganda. Central to genocide is the psychological and sociological construction of the concept of the enemy, an abstraction into which the propagandist can embed all the fears and loathing of the citizenry, all their primal anxieties about survival and well-being. Every nation that goes to war must first construct the face of the enemy for its soldiers to want to kill and its citizens to want to work and sacrifice to prevent its takeover of their land, home, way of life, women and children, and even their god. Recall Bandura's research on the power of a dehumanizing label.
Education. All nations educate children to learn information that the state believes is vital for them to know. What happens when that educational process becomes distorted so that biases and self-serving values prevail and knowledge of the truth is suppressed? It happens to some extent in most countries when they fail to include the history of their atrocities or defeats in history texts. Beside these omissions, education is compromised when teachers and text writers are subjugated to powerful national forces that instruct them to teach hate and lies and falsehoods to children as if they were merely facts about the enemies of the state.

Where is That Elusive Line?

So what have we learned so far about that line between good and evil? Alexander Solzhenitsyn offers an insight into where it can be found: "The line between good and evil lies in the center of every human heart"--not in some abstract moral, celestial space, but right here in each of our individual and collective beings.

Conclusion

We have seen that education can be corrupted and turn out mindless nazis and perpetrators of evil, when the state controls what students and teachers must think. It is imperative that we each make a personal commitment never again to allow education to be perverted into a tool for prejudice, an instrument for demeaning human nature, or an intellectual weapon for justifying the evils of inhumane treatment of our brothers and sisters of any race, religion, ethnicity, or political persuasion. Education must be our salvation, not our damnation.
Evil is not simply in the past and in far-off lands. There are still forces in our own country and throughout the world that promote evil. We must not make them our enemies in the abstract, but monitor their ideas and actions in the concrete, and do all in our power to oppose their distorted values by promoting human understanding, compassion, and commitments that foster peace at home and abroad. You must sustain a sense of moral and social intelligence, to always think critically, to stand up for your beliefs regardless of the immediate consequences, to oppose unjust authorities and reveal the true nature of fools. I urge you to make a life goal to be heroic, to learn how to resist undesirable social pressures and be willing to stand alone. Otherwise, we join ranks with the brute beast and get in line as passive witnesses to the next generation of dictators and perpetrators of evil.
Recall the UNESCO Charter, which declares: "Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that we must erect the ramparts of peace."
Thus, the first step in preventing genocide begins by promoting peace, love, and understanding in your minds and in mine. It is our first line of defense against evil, and it is the source of strength we all need to resist the ever-present, pervasive, powerful forces in the world that would lure us across that seductive line to descend into the realm of the next generation of evil perpetrators. Resist those pressures, and help others to also dissent, disobey, rebel.
So go in peace, Shalom.

References

Bandura, A., Underwood, B., & Fromson, M. E. (1975). Disinhibition of aggression through diffusion of responsibility and dehumanization of victims. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 9, 253-269.
Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to authority: An experimental view. New York: Harper & Row.
Haney, C., Banks, W. C., & Zimbardo, P. G. (1973). Interpersonal dynamics in a simulated prison. International Journal of Criminology & Penology, 1, 69-97.
Zimbardo, P. G. (1970). The human choice: Individuation, reason, and order versus deindividuation, impulse, and chaos. In W. J. Arnold & D. Levine (Eds.), Nebraska Symposium on Motivation: Vol. 17 (pp. 237-307). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Zimbardo, P. G. (1999). Stanford Prison Experiment Slide Show [On-line]. Available: http://www.prisonexp.org
Zimbardo, P. G., Haney, C., Banks, W. C., & Jaffe, D. (1973, April 8). The mind is a formidable jailer: A Pirandellian prison. The New York Times Magazine, 122, 38-60.
This article is condensed and adapted from Dr. Zimbardo's Psi Chi Distinguished Lecture, "The Psychology of Evil: Seducing Good People Into Evil Deeds," delivered on March 31, 2000, at the annual meeting of the Southeastern Psychological Association in New Orleans, Louisiana.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Philip G. Zimbardo, PhD, has been a professor of psychology at Stanford University since 1968, after having taught previously at Yale University, New York University (NYU), and Columbia University. Zimbardo received his BA from Brooklyn College (1954) and his PhD from Yale University (1959). As author of more than 250 professional articles and chapters and two dozen books, Zimbardo's ideas have influenced many generations of colleagues, students, and the general public. Philip G. Zimbardo (image)His popular introductory psychology text, Psychology and Life, going into its 16th edition, is the oldest continuously selling textbook in U.S. psychology. His trade books, Shyness and The Shy Child, have been best-sellers in the United States, translated into 10 foreign languages, and influential in starting both new research and treatment of shyness, especially in adults. Zimbardo designed, wrote, and hosted the award-winning PBS television series, Discovering Psychology, shown nationally in colleges and high schools and now internationally, which he will soon update and also add several new programs, including segments on cultural psychology and cognitive neuroscience.
Dr. Zimbardo loves to teach and teaches intensively and extensively--across the curriculum at Stanford and in colloquia and teaching workshops. This is his sixth decade teaching introductory psychology (since 1957). He has won numerous awards for his distinguished teaching at Stanford and from other institutions, NYU, the American Psychological Foundation, the Western Psychological Association, Phi Beta Kappa, and Division 2 of APA (Teaching of Psychology). Zimbardo started a Psi Chi chapter when he was at NYU (Bronx campus) and reactivated the Stanford chapter, serving as its faculty advisor for a decade. He has also given a number of Psi Chi addresses at regional and national conventions. In addition, he has received awards for his writing, research, and video productions.
Zimbardo continues an active research program in the area of social psychology, focusing especially on aspects of aggression and violence, the psychology of time perspective, the dynamics of shyness, the psychology of cults, the origins of madness in normal people, and the socialization of men into becoming torturers. His Stanford Prison Experiment on the dramatic consequences of putting good students in mock prison has become a classic demonstration of the power of social situations and a cornerstone in his general interest in the psychology of evil.
His current service as president of WPA and active campaign for the presidency of APA, along with a full teaching and research schedule, keeps Zimbardo's passion for psychology flowing, and "giving it away to the public" foremost on his agenda. See some of the free informative sites that he has developed for psychologists (www.prisonexp.org; www.realpsychology.com; and his own site, www.zimbardo.com) as well as the featured interview with him in the October 2000 issue of Psychology Today magazine.
http://tinyurl.com/2a6brq

READ MORE: Diamond, S. A. (1996). Anger, madness, and the daimonic. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EVIL
Devils, Demons, and the Daimonic, Stephen A. Diamond, Ph. D.: http://tinyurl.com/2t3yd2

HAMAS: FATAH FINANCED BY AMERICANS
14 - 20 June 2007
Issue No. 849



Out of control
Factional infighting threatens to engulf Gaza, reports Khaled Amayreh from the West Bank

As Al-Ahram Weekly went to press, sporadic fighting between Hamas and militiamen affiliated with Fatah strong man Mohamed Dahlan was raging in parts of the Gaza Strip, with Hamas appearing to have the upper hand.

At least eight Fatah fighters were killed Wednesday morning when Hamas militiamen attacked and overran Fatah positions in Gaza City and surrounding suburbs. More than 10 civilians were injured in the fighting, the most ferocious since Fatah and Hamas signed the Mecca Agreement in February.

Hamas fighters seized a refugee camp outside Gaza City after storming the headquarters of Fatah's National Security Forces. Eyewitnesses said the attack met little resistance.

An estimated 50 people have been killed since the latest round of infighting started on Sunday evening, with Tuesday witnessing the bloodiest attacks. In the northern part of the Gaza Strip, Hamas attacked and overran a compound belonging to the Preventive Security Force (PSF).

Around 200 Hamas fighters stormed the compound where as many as 500 Fatah fighters were holed up. They fired mortars and rocket-propelled grenades at the multi-story building. The raid followed demands by the Ezzeddin Al-Qassam Brigades that all PSF personnel abandon their positions or face attack. After surrendering to Hamas, PSF members were allowed to return to their families unharmed.

Hamas said the decision to storm PSF headquarters came after Fatah fighters abducted and executed Omar Al-Rantisi, a nephew of the late Hamas leader Abdul-Aziz Al-Rantisi, assassinated by Israel in 2004.

Hamas insists the current confrontation is not between Fatah and Hamas but between the Palestinian people and an American-armed and financed group within Fatah that is seeking to promote a Zionist agenda, an allusion to Dahlan who has vowed on several occasions to destabilise the Hamas government.

"This group has allied itself with the enemies of our people, leaving us no option but to stop them," said a statement issued by Hamas Tuesday.

The current round of the conflict has witnessed some of the ugliest scenes yet. One Fatah member was thrown of the roof of a multi- storey building, dying instantly. A Muslim preacher on his way to a mosque was shot dead.

Earlier on Tuesday a rocket-propelled grenade was fired at the home of Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh. Haniyeh escaped unharmed.

Hamas's spokesman Fawzi Barhoum accused Fatah of firing the rockets in an attempt to assassinate Haniyeh. He vowed to pursue "the Zionist collaborators".

"Hamas has decided to punish the attackers and it will do so without mercy," said Barhoum.

On Monday gunmen affiliated to the PSF attacked Haniyeh's office, interrupting a cabinet meeting. Following the attack Haniyeh accused "elements within Fatah" of trying to bring down the unity government.

Both Abbas and Haniyeh have appealed for an end to the fighting but neither can exercise control over their respective groups' armed wings.

The continuation of the infighting, and Hamas's rout of Fatah in northern Gaza, prompted the latter to suspend participation in the national unity government. The decision, observers believe, is a step towards Fatah leaving the government altogether. That, almost inevitably, will lead to an increase in factional fighting.

A frustrated Abbas said on Tuesday the conflict was destroying Palestinian national interests and undermining the Palestinian cause. "In order to protect the higher national interests of our people and to try and stop the bloodshed, in my position as head of the Palestinian Authority and head of all security forces I call for an immediate halt to fire," he said.

The increasingly weak PA president earlier accused Hamas of "wanting to carry out a coup" and of "seeking to control Gaza by force".

Leading Hamas member Ahmed Bahr retorted by accusing Abbas of "responsibility for all the bloodshed in Gaza".

"It is Abbas who gave the Dahlan gang carte blanch to terrorise Gazans, undermine the government and carry out the American-Israeli agenda in the service of the enemies of our people," accused Bahr.

The failure of Hamas and Fatah leaders to halt the bloodshed has frustrated Major General Burhan Hamad, head of the Egyptian security delegation, who has been struggling to negotiate a truce.

Burhan hinted on Tuesday that he might ask the Palestinian people to take to the streets to stop the fighting if the two groups could not reach an agreement.

In an impassioned plea he said, "we must make them ashamed of themselves and what they are doing."

"They have killed all hope," he continued. "They have killed the future of their people."

Commentators believe Hamas is more determined than ever to isolate Dahlan and his supporters while trying, as much as possible, not to antagonise the overall Fatah movement.

"Hamas's ultimate aim is to form at least the semblance of a united front with patriotic Fatah elements against the Dahlan groups," said one Gaza journalist close to Hamas.

Palestinian Foreign Minister Ziad Abu Amr was quoted as saying Wednesday that the violence could spread to the West Bank if nothing was done. Amr, in Tokyo for a visit aimed at urging Japan to renew and increase aid to the cash- strapped PA, dismissed as "speculation" rumours that Fatah had opted to leave the national unity government.
http://tinyurl.com/27shp3

High Drama: Estate Planning Anna Nicole Smith Style
Posted June 13, 2007

A Conversation With Horace Cooper, Assistant Professor of Law at George Mason University

Just as the trials and tribulations of Hollywood’s celebrity blondes may make for good television drama, they make for even better legal lessons. Such is the case with the ongoing legal dispute between the late Anna Nicole Smith and the estate of her former husband, octogenarian billionaire J. Howard Marshall.

Preceding her death, Anna Nicole sued to turn her marriage to Marshall into a sizable bequest. Upset that Marshall’s entire fortune was left to his son, E. Pierce, she sought legal recourse in multiple courts before the case, Marshall v. Marshall, made headlines at the U.S. Supreme Court. The High Court’s decision, as well as the outcome of ongoing court proceedings, will have a lasting impact on all of us.

That’s because, according to Horace Cooper, assistant professor of law at George Mason University, Anna Nicole’s “[t]urning what normally would be a state matter – a probate dispute in the state of Texas – into a federal case was both audacious in its creativity and alarming in its consequences.”

Recently, Mr. Cooper joined CFIF Corporate Counsel & Senior Vice President Renee Giachino to discuss Smith’s “forum shopping” and why average Americans should care about the outcome of this saga.

Click on the link below to listen to the interview originally heard on "Your Turn - Meeting Nonsense With Commonsense" on WEBY 1330 AM, Northwest Florida's talk radio. ...
[Listen to the interview here: http://tinyurl.com/2bvg2k]
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Why the Anna Nicole Smith Saga Actually Matters
Posted April 12, 2007

As tawdry and ridiculous as the tale of Anna Nicole Smith is, her saga has already had important real-world consequences to Americans.

By gaming our legal system in pursuit of her deceased husband's fortune, including a victory at the U.S. Supreme Court, Ms. Smith's tragic life leaves a legacy beyond tasteless late-night jokes and tabloid obsessions. Indeed, that legacy may include increasing litigation costs and courtroom burdens for businesses, philanthropies and everyday citizens across America.

By now, many are familiar with the tragic tale underlying this case.

Anna Nicole Smith, whose real name was Vickie Lynn Marshall, married 89-year-old, wheelchair-confined billionaire J. Howard Marshall (II) in June 1994. Although Mr. Marshall lavished gifts and wealth upon Anna Nicole, he never included her in his actual will. In fact, Mr. Marshall named his beneficiaries and made it irrevocable shortly after he married Anna Nicole, not before.

According to Anna Nicole, however, Mr. Marshall had promised "to provide for her financial security through a gift" in the form of a trust.

One of Mr. Marshall's sons, E. Pierce Marshall, was instead the ultimate beneficiary of Mr. Marshall's estate. The elderly Mr. Marshall ultimately passed away in August 1995, igniting a firestorm of litigation regarding his fortune.

Anna Nicole filed a lawsuit in Texas probate court, alleging that Mr. Marshall had promised half of his wealth to her, and that E. Pierce Marshall had illegally interfered with that promised gift to her by forging documents and distorting evidence.

Months after filing her Texas lawsuit, however, Anna Nicole filed a second action, this time in federal bankruptcy court in California. In that action, Anna Nicole alleged the same essential facts as she did in the Texas court.

Thus, Anna Nicole Smith initiated duplicative and parallel lawsuits in two different courts, hoping to cherry-pick the better result. The state and federal cases centered upon identical claims, and obviously multiplied the costs in judicial and private resources to litigate them.

Ultimately, the Texas court conducted an exhaustive 95-day trial that included six days of testimony from Anna Nicole, and found in favor of E. Pierce Marshall, Mr. Marshall's son. According to the unanimous jury, Mr. Marshall had never made the promises that Anna Nicole alleged, nor had E. Pierce forged documents or evidence. Accordingly, Anna Nicole was denied recovery from Mr. Howard's estate.

In contrast, unfortunately, the federal bankruptcy court, after a much more abbreviated and superficial procedure, accepted Anna Nicole's version of the facts. That court refused to defer to the Texas Court, held that E. Pierce had forged documents and evidence and awarded Anna Nicole $475 million.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals later reversed the federal bankruptcy court's decision, ruling that the federal courts should have abstained in deference to the Texas state court. In doing so, it cited the long-recognized "Probate Exception" to federal jurisdiction, which holds that state courts are much more capable of applying state probate laws and possess much greater expertise in evaluating exhaustive evidence than federal courts.

The U.S. Supreme Court, however, reversed the Ninth Circuit decision in May 2006 and remanded the case. The Supreme Court greatly narrowed this "Probate Exception," thereby expanding federal courts' jurisdiction and increasing their ability to intrude into traditionally state-level affairs.

So why does this matter beyond the tabloids? Several reasons.

First, the case illustrates the increasingly corrosive power of judicial abuse in America. By sanctioning increased federal intrusion into traditionally state matters, the Supreme Court opened the door to duplicative litigation and lawsuit abuse. Potential plaintiffs now possess greater potential power to multiply litigation in parallel courts, thereby increasing costs and potential losses upon businesses and individual defendants.

After all, businesses and individuals already settle cases rather than defend themselves against litigious plaintiffs, simply because the alternative of exhaustive litigation, bad publicity and potential losses is far too high. Recent studies estimate that litigation currently costs Americans between $140 billion and $250 billion every single year. Increasing plaintiffs' ability to forum-shop and duplicate lawsuits, and then cherry-pick the most beneficial verdict, will only multiply this injustice.

Just as ominously, state attorneys general will now possess even more leverage power, as they'll be more inclined to file duplicative lawsuits in pursuit of political self-aggrandizement. Think Elliot Spitzer and California's Bill Lockyer.

In other words, "jackpot justice" just got easier.

Second, this decision undermines states' rights. As the Probate Exception recognized, state courts are more adept at applying state laws and evaluating exhaustive evidentiary conflicts than more distant federal courts. Now, however, federal courts, including even highly-specialized bankruptcy courts, may increasingly serve as de facto "appellate courts" over state court decisions. This clearly weakens our federalist system and only encourages greater federal overreach.

Third, this case threatens philanthropies and estate planning across America. Previously, estate planners and philanthropies could rely upon the greater consistency and predictability of state courts' interpretation of their own laws, thereby avoiding acrimonious litigation by disgruntled potential heirs. Now, however, federal courts that are less familiar with individual states' estate-planning laws may distort them and undermine confidence in speedy and efficient estate distribution. Smaller philanthropies and less-wealthy individuals are particularly threatened, as they're less-capable of conducting burdensome litigation in multiple venues.

The Anna Nicoles of the world will instead possess increased leverage.

In the end, as George Mason University law professor Horace Cooper noted in a recent Legal Times column, Anna Nicole's actual legal claim will likely be extinguished on separate grounds. Accordingly, as he observes, the original Texas trial verdict will probably ultimately prevail in this specific case.

Nevertheless, because of the Supreme Court's ruling, the Anna Nicole Smith tragedy thus includes unfortunate damage to business interests, judicial efficiency, states' rights, philanthropic gifts and estate-planning across America. As judicial intrusion, including that of federal courts, increases across America, this will likely be her most lasting legacy of all.
http://tinyurl.com/28zl4n