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1st
EMBL/EMBO Joint Conference 2000 |
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Session
III |
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On human genome projects Uses and abuses |
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John Collinge
[Chair], Imperial College London, UK
With the Human Genome Project, for the first time
in its history modern biology was transformed
into "Big Science". Since then, entire new vistas
have opened up for possible progress in the medical
sciences. But, as with nuclear power in an earlier
age, there has grown an awareness of negative
as well as positive repercussions that may accompany
this monumental success of "the genomic turn"
in modern biology. Historians have documented
the state implementation of eugenics [one form
of applied genetics] in different national contexts
in Europe and in the U.S. during the relatively
recent past, and how such science was then applied
to rationalize extermination policies by the Nazi
regime in Germany. With the revolutionary progress
of recombinant DNA technologies and big-scale
gemonics research, worries have now resurfaced
that these enabling technologies can be used for
undesirable as well as desirable ends. As science
has become integrated into "the new economy" of
globalization, the knowledge it produces is being
directly transplanted into the "savage" fields
of the market place where the profit motive is
omnipresent. Generation and use of genetic information
relating [to] people should therefore be accompanied
by the establishment of democratic ways and means
for control, at the local as well as the global
level, to preempt the danger of abuses: discrimination,
violation of privacy, or excessive commercialization.
An additional concern is how "the genomic turn"
in biology may be transforming the world-view
and self-under-standing of people in society:
their view of Nature, their view of themselves. |
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