The Dangerous Erosion of Legal Oversight in Oryx & Crake
Every day, new scientific breakthroughs promise to change the way we live—gene editing, GMOs, and pharmaceuticals bring innovative ideas. However, progress can bring ethical complications. In her novel Oryx & Crake, Margaret Atwood imagines a world where government regulation fails to keep up with rapid biotechnological advancement. Without legal boundaries, corporations operate without accountability, prioritizing innovation and profit over human life. Atwood’s dystopian world warns of what happens when ethical responsibility is left to the discretion of powerful biotech companies: absolute catastrophe. As Atwood stated in a 2004 lecture at MIT regarding this novel, “nothing is absolutely pure invention.” The fictional world she creates in Oryx & Crake echo real-world trends, meaning the dangers she envisions are not far removed from our reality. Atwood’s novel cautions that when legal regulations fail to enforce ethical responsibilities in biotech, corporations act unchecked, fixating on profit over human life, which leaves behind devastating consequences.
First, it is paramount to understand the events that unfold in Oryx & Crake in order to draw parallels with real-world events—parallels that prompt Margaret Atwood to see her dystopia not as pure fiction, but as a plausible future. The first epigraph in Oryx & Crake comes from the novel Gulliver’s Travels. In this novel by Jonathan Swift, he follows a character by the name of Lemuel Gulliver who takes remarkable travels. From the outset, it is abundantly clear that Gulliver’s account is a work of complete fantasy, despite Gulliver claiming that he is relaying “plain matter of fact,” not fiction (Swift, qtd. in Atwood). Through Lemuel Gulliver’s travels, Swift asserts the idea that even the most outlandish fiction has something of substance to say about the real world. In much the same way, Atwood builds her dystopia using speculative exaggeration to warn of real dangers. She applies a literary form called reductio ad absurdum by stretching current scientific and corporate trends to their extreme to expose their flaws and potential for disaster. In doing so, she highlights the potential consequences of unchecked scientific experimentation and corporate control, creating a dystopia that feels alarmingly tenable.
When the novel begins, Atwood introduces a post-apocalyptic world that had become decimated due to corporate greed. The main character, Snowman, is seemingly the last human alive. He struggles to survive on a beach littered with rusted car parts, in a world ravaged by climate change. To show how Snowman got to this point, Atwood offers the story through the lens of Jimmy, the younger version of Snowman who lived in a pre-apocalyptic world that was vastly different from Snowman’s. In Jimmy’s world, he lived in a corporate “compound” run by the corporation of OrganInc Farms, where his dad worked as a genographer, and his mother as a microbiologist. The compounds were high-tech, gated communities dominated by the scientific and technological corporations that had accumulated immense power through their innovation. The world had become increasingly geared toward STEM, and through the power corporations had obtained, they reshaped the social hierarchy. Status was now determined by one’s relationship to corporate science: those who worked for these powerful institutions lived in privilege, while those who didn’t were relegated to the neglected, dangerous "pleeblands." The pleeblands were overpopulated, disease-ridden, and marked by crime and instability.
Although Jimmy’s family certainly benefited from living inside a compound, his parents' opposing worldviews reveal the moral disparity that existed within their society. His father embodies the role of corporate compliance—defending the security and separation of the compound elites from the unpredictability of the pleeblands. His mother, by contrast, grows disillusioned with the corporate regime. She yearns for the return to a more humane, less controlled way of life, mourning the loss of the life they once had, now replaced with a system ruled by profit and science.
Jimmy’s mother’s quiet—but deliberate—rebellion against corporate rule reveals how dissent was treated as a threat to the dominance and control corporations had obtained.. When his mother grew embittered with her current life, where her compliance would continue to encourage corporate control and overreach, she took off, becoming a fugitive to the compounds that gave her employment and family security. In the aftermath of her disappearance, Jimmy becomes the target of frequent interrogations by the CorpSeCorps men—representatives of corporate law enforcement who behave like agents of a totalitarian regime. Jimmy is subjected to intrusive questioning all because his mother rejected the system. Her disappearance wasn’t just blatant disobedience in the eyes of the CorpSeCorp men; this was an act that could have cost her her life. The treatment of Jimmy’s mother is reflective of a world where institutions no longer serve the public, but instead protect the interests of powerful corporations. Traditional institutional frameworks were now replaced by privatized, self-interested enforcement that serves to silence opposition rather than uphold justice. This is how Atwood shows that the erosion of ethical oversight begins not with chaos, but with the quiet normalization of authoritarian control disguised as order.
In many cases, legality and morality do not align, particularly when powerful corporations are guided by profit incentive. For example, when Jimmy worked at the AnooYoo compound, he was tasked with lauding any new cream, pill, or protein bar in AnooYoo advertisements. This often led to Jimmy creating new words or “verbal fabrications,” as Jimmy calls them, to purposely deceive the customer (Atwood, 249). These dubious claims and contrived words saddened Jimmy, but were commended by AnooYoo—while it may be legal, Jimmy finds it unethical. In Oryx and Crake, the corporations operate with little to no oversight, repeatedly overstepping ethical boundaries and disregarding long-term consequences in pursuit of innovation and financial gain. While Atwood deliberately exaggerates their behavior to construct a dystopian warning, the novel serves as a critique of a world in which profit is prioritized over human well-being. With today’s rapid advancements in science and technology, the idea of corporations acting without legal or ethical accountability feels less like fiction and more like a potential future.
The first striking example of a corporation overstepping legal and ethical boundaries comes from OrganInc Farms, the compound where Jimmy’s family lived and worked. This compound thrived and was known for its innovative ideas regarding human organ transplants. Jimmy’s father was complicit in the breeding process of pigs designed to grow many organs that would later be used in humans. While this was marketed as an innocent, possibly beneficial scientific breakthrough for humanity, it raises serious ethical concerns. But perhaps the most conspicuous instance of corporate violation and overstepping of ethical boundaries comes from one of Snowman’s flashbacks early on in the novel. He recalls a time when a heap of dead animal carcasses were being burned to prevent the spread of a disease. While Jimmy and his father watch the animals burn, Jimmy’s father and his co-worker talk about rumors of the disease being brought into the facility, possibly by a rival bio-corp company, in order to “drive up the prices” (Atwood, 18). This sabotage of rival corporations is easily seen as morally corrupt, as well as illegal. While direct sabotage to this degree might seem unlikely, intentionally sabotaging rival enterprises has long been an issue before this novel was released, and is still prevalent today. Corporations not only have a legal and ethical responsibility to consumers, but to their competitors as well, and in order to grasp the dangers of deliberate corporate sabotage it is crucial to look at real-world examples that mirror instances from Oryx & Crake, and transcend the mere fiction in the novel. One particularly relevant example is the case of Monsanto v. DuPont, which shows how corporations strategically attempt to exploit legal ambiguities to unfairly gain competitive advantages. The case involved Monsanto, which had developed genetically modified soybean seeds resistant to its herbicide, Roundup. At the time of this incident in 2011, Monsanto controlled about 90% of the soybean seed market (Chao & Silver, 97). DuPont had obtained a license from Monsanto to use this technology but subsequently combined Monsanto’s patented technology with DuPont’s own genetically engineered technology (Optimum GAT) without explicit permission. Monsanto sued DuPont for patent infringement and breach of license agreements. Monsanto won $1 billion in damages from DuPont, even though DuPont had not yet sold any seeds combining the contested technologies. The damages were “based on seeds DuPont had developed, but not yet sold” (Chao & Silver, 97). Ultimately, the court found DuPont guilty of willful patent infringement.
This instance shows how corporations have, and will, toss ethical and legal concerns to the side in order to gain advantage—or in this case—entrance into a market. Not only have large corporations proven to place profit over human life, but they do so with rival firms as well. Although this scenario isn’t outright physical sabotage, it highlights corporate strategy to unfairly leverage their company’s bottom-line. In a world like Oryx & Crake where weak legal and ethical oversights exist, it reinforces the idea that unchecked corporate power can—and often will—operate beyond moral boundaries when the stakes are high enough. Atwood’s dystopian novel, though fictional, reflects real-world patterns where companies are not only willing to have their moral guidelines compromised for profit, but are enabled to do so by the very systems meant to regulate them.
Another deeply unethical corporation that exists in Atwood’s world is HelthWyzer, a pharmaceutical company that is representative of the most dangerous possibilities of privatized healthcare. In the summer post-graduation at HelthWyzer High, a high school located within the HelthWyzer Compound, Crake, Jimmy’s best friend, had found out that HelthWyzer was secretly contriving diseases and releasing them into the population in order to sell the corresponding cures. Crake’s father had discovered this morally reprehensible scheme and had told his wife, and supervisor, but was reported and executed by HelthWyzer just shortly after. HelthWyzer’s acts of deceit and dishonesty embody the worst of possibilities when it comes to unchecked, unregulated privatized pharmaceutical companies that, quite literally, prioritize their bottom-line over human life and well-being. HelthWyzer’s ability to profit from the very diseases it engineers reflects a weaponized business model—one that Atwood critiques for its disturbingly plausible parallels to real-world corporate behavior.
The fictional pharmaceutical company HelthWyzer in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx & Crake—which clandestinely manufactures diseases to profit from their cures—bears unsettling resemblance to real-world corporate malfeasance, notably Purdue Pharma’s role in the OxyContin crisis. While Purdue did not create diseases, its misleading marketing of OxyContin shows how profit-driven motives can lead to widespread public harm. According to Art Van Zee in the American Journal of Public Health, in much of its marketing, “Purdue trained its sales representatives to carry the message that the risk of addiction was “less than one percent,” when in reality, the studies they cited as evidence were misrepresenting the statistics (Van Zee). These misleading, cherry-picked statistics contradict numerous studies that find that treating non-cancer-related chronic pain with narcotics has a high incidence of prescription drug abuse (Fishbain et al, Hoffman et al, Kouyanou et al, qtd. in Van Zee). Deliberately downplaying the risk of OxyContin addiction allowed Purdue to generate immense profits—“OxyContin revenue grew from $48 million in 1996 to almost $1.1 billion in 2000”—while fueling a nationwide epidemic of addiction (Van Zee). Purdue Pharma’s strategy is incredibly similar to that of HelthWyzer’s exploitation of public health for financial gain, displaying the dangers of unchecked corporate power in the pharmaceutical industry. Though real-life occurrences that align with Oryx & Crake, the novel—maybe horrifyingly—begins to seem less like hyperbole.
Atwood takes this a step further with the RejoovenEsense compound, which brought about the end of humanity through unethical practices of scientific advancement and research. Before creating the BlyssPluss pill that ultimately led to humanity’s destruction, Crake, who had earned a high position within the RejoovenEsense compound, showed Jimmy some other secretive and ethically dubious bioengineering projects taking place at RejoovenEsense. Crake and his colleagues had bioengineered a new human race void of imperfections titled Crakers, dogs called Wolvogs that looked friendly but were extremely dangerous, and they had genetically altered butterflies to make them glow in the dark. However, Crake’s biggest project was the BlyssPluss pill, and he put Jimmy in charge of advertising it. This pill was advertised to do three things: protect users from STDs, provide users with unlimited sex-drive, and prolong youth. Conveniently not mentioned in the deceitful advertisements for the BlyssPluss pill would be side effects including sterilization, and exposure to a deadly disease (which not even Jimmy knew about). These projects show that Crake was not just a dangerous, rogue scientist, but a product of a system that allowed, and even celebrated, unregulated experimentation as long as it promised profit. This system reached its breaking point when the BlyssPluss pill hit the market. It sold rapidly, and as part of Crake’s hidden agenda, it triggered a global pandemic that led to the near-extinction of humanity.
Atwood’s depiction of RejoovenEsense also has real-world parallels in the pharmaceutical industry, where the drive for profit often comes at the expense of a compromised ethical integrity. “In the United States, drug manufacturers are required to disclose serious side effects and unexpected adverse events to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) within 15 days of being notified by a patient” (Plain,1). Yet, between 2004 and 2014, a study by the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health, in collaboration with Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Carlson School of Management, found that 10% of companies fail to comply with that requirement (Plain, 1). Even more alarmingly, when the side effects were fatal “3 percent were reported within three to six months, and another 3 percent took six months or longer to report,” (Plain, 6). These delays and omissions aren’t accidents, they are a deliberate attempt to maximize profit and maintain company reputation. While it is true these companies aren’t attempting to erase humanity as Crake did, the logic that drives them is eerily similar. In both Atwood’s dystopia and our own world, the lack of ethics corporations possess prompt them to suppress the truth, sell dangerous products, and prioritize revenue over responsibility, with the only deterrent being legal enforcement that is sometimes underused, or disturbingly ineffective.
It is tempting to view Atwood’s novel as a work made solely for entertainment, but it’s also a cautionary tale about how a lack of oversight could lead to the dystopian consequences seen in the book. It is evident that the ethical fabric of corporations has long been fraying, and when the legal ramifications to committing morally reprehensible acts weakens, or vanishes completely, ordinary citizens are left defenseless. Atwood is urging us to heed her warnings, she isn’t telling us to fear science, but to fear the consequences that arise when profit is the main motivation for human ingenuity, even when it comes at the expense of human life. The world in Oryx & Crake might be built on exaggeration, but Atwood didn’t have to imagine it very hard, because her imaginings already exist in our world, and everyday, it seems that we inch closer to Atwood’s prophecy being our evening news.
Works Cited
Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. Anchor Books, 2003.
Chao, Bernard, and Derigan Silver. "A Case Study in Patent Litigation Transparency." Journal of Dispute
Resolution, vol. 21 November, 2014. pp. 83–112. University of Denver Legal Studies Research
Paper. https://papers.ssrn.com.
Plain, Charlie. "Drug Companies Failing to Properly Report Side Effects." University of Minnesota School
of Public Health, 30 July 2015 https://www.sph.umn.edu/news/drug-companies-failing-
Van Zee A. “The Promotion and Marketing of Oxycontin: Commercial Triumph, Public Health Tragedy.”
Am J Public Health. 2009 February. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2622774/
“Margaret Atwood at MIT - 'Oryx and Crake' Revisited - 2004 Abramowitz Lecture” (Video). Youtube,
uploaded by MIT Video Productions 5 September, 2019. https://youtu.be/kB_bhdEX8OE?
Ethan Lucas is the Third Place Winner of the 2026 Literature Essay Contest.