Monday Morning Madness

I drove into the financial district early this morning and began to notice a good two to three hundred San Francisco police officers in riot suits posted around the perimeter of the Moscone Convention Center. There were barriers erected, checkpoints set up, and helicopters buzzing over us. Given the extreme show of force, for a second, I feared we were hosting the always combative G-8 Conference, but then recalled that the G-8 was being held tomorrow in Georgia. Well, the morning edition of the SF Chronicle provided me the answer. "This week, San Francisco is hosting the annual meeting of the Biotechnology Industry Organization. Approximately 20,000 scientists, executives and financiers from across the country and around the world are attending the event, which runs through Wednesday. And just as in the beginning, biotechnology remains controversial, particularly the re-engineering of foods and experimenting with material from human embryos. In addition, biotech is one of the world's most thoroughly globalized industries, making it a target of protests." Someone had mentioned this to me about a month ago, but I had all but forgotten about it. Guess the activist community has had to make a tough choice between protesting either the G-8 in Georgia or the international biotech conference in San Francisco. I'm hoping the protesters prefer peaches with their granola.