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1st
EMBL/EMBO Joint Conference 2000 |
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Session
III |
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Debating human identity Institutional commitments and consequences |
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Sheila Jasanoff, Professor of Science and Public Policy, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University, USA
As the Human Genome Project [HGP] nears completion, media reports
are filled with excited accounts of the amazing frontiers that genetic
knowledge will open up for novel therapies and preventive medicine.
A contrary theme worries about control rather than liberation, focusing
on the ethical, legal, and political effects of reducing human identity
to the genes. Termed "geneticization" by some authors, this line of
critique suggests that there are high costs involved in reconceptualizing
human identity in terms of genes: the loss of respect for per-sonhood;
the commodification of bodies and parts; the potential for manipulating
the human genome under rhetorical cover of enhancing human capabilities.
This presentation suggests that such determinist perspectives on the
HGP whether positive or negative may stand in the way of progressive
critique aimed at democratic control of the technologys potential.
Genes, I argue, do not define human beings pure and simple, any more
than color or sex or head size. Rather, how genetic knowledge is related
to conceptions of "the human" is mediated at every turn by social
institutions and professional discourses, such as those of law, ethics,
and risk assessment. Looking at a number of recent American debates
about genetics and human identity [ownership, surrogate parenting,
cloning], I will show that the discussion of what can be done with
genetic information is taking place in a field already deeply configured
by prior ideas of nature, property, family, and the rights of individuals.
These earlier commitments are helping to frame the new technological
options in culturally contingent ways. I will consider the implications
of these observations for a more reflective politics of technology,
both in America and in a wider global context.
Biography
Sheila Jasanoff is Professor of Science and Public Policy at Harvard
Universitys John F. Kennedy School of Government and holds faculty
affiliations in History of Science, Public Health, and Environmental
Science and Public policy. A lawyer by training, she has devoted
her research career to the interactions of law, science, and politics.
Her specific areas of interest include law, science, and technology;
environmental regulation and risk management; and comparative science
and technology policy. Before joining Harvard, she was for 20 years
on the faculty of Cornell University, where she founded and chaired
the Department of Science and Technology Studies. She is the author
of Risk Management and Political Culture, The Fifth Branch: Science
Advisers as Policymakers, and Science at the Bar: Law, Science,
and Technology in America, and co-author of Controlling Chemicals:
The Politics of Regulation in Europe and the United States. She
is also coeditor of the Handbook of Science and Technology Studies
and section editor for Science and Technology Studies of the International
Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences. Jasanoff has held
visiting appointments at Yale, Oxford, and Kyoto Universities. She
has served on the Board of Directors of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science and is president of the Society for
Social Studies of Science. |
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