Thursday, 4:30 PM
Bio tech protest fails to attract large crowds
By Scott Allen
Globe Staff
A colorful band of about 150 people paraded through mostly empty streets in Roxbury and the South End yesterday in an attempt to rally opposition to a high-security research laboratory now under construction at Boston University Medical Center. But the protest fell far short of the mass demonstrations against the dangers of biotechnology that some had predicted.
The "Environmental Justice Parade" had been billed as the biggest public event of a broader protest against a national biotechnology conference in Boston this week and police had been bracing for what they said could be the city's biggest demonstrations in three years. But the peaceful march, led by a ragtime band and a Vermont-based theater group, drew only a fraction of the 1,500 protesters police had predicted for the opening of the four-day conference. There were no arrests by the dozens of officers on hand.
Leaders of BioJustice 2007, as the anti-biotechnology protest is called, said they were not disappointed with the modest turnout for the protest against the biological laboratory, blaming police for exaggerating expectations of a big protest.
"We're not playing a numbers game. We are trying to get as clear a message out to the public as we possibly can," said Brian Tokar of the Vermont-based Institute for Social Ecology, one of the BioJustice organizers. He said the biotechnology officials meeting at the convention center this week "are seizing control of our food, our seeds and our health and they need to be stopped ... It represents a very serious hazard to our future and the biolab issue is one that really brings all the pieces together."
