From the Council for Responsible Genetics on the 30th Anniversary of GeneWatch magazine:
Biotechnology in Our Lives What Modern Genetics Can Tell You about Assisted Reproduction, Human Behavior, and Personalized Medicine, and Much More
Edited by Sheldon Krimsky and Jeremy Gruber For a quarter of a century, the Council for Responsible Genetics has provided a unique historical lens into the modern history, science, ethics, and politics of genetic technologies. Since 1983 the Council has had leading scientists, activists, science writers, and public health advocates researching and reporting on a broad spectrum of issues, including genetically engineered foods, biological weapons, genetic privacy and discrimination, reproductive technologies, and human cloning. Written for the nonscientist, Biotechnology in Our Lives examines how these issues affect us daily —whether we realize it or not. AVAILABLE NOW from Skyhorse Press
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that the prediction is valid. Our collective knowledge of these topics at present is so rudimentary that the extension of casual assumptions, almost to their elevation of axioms, risks becoming what could properly—and, yes, negatively—be characterized as ideology and, in vernacular terms, as a ‘religion.’ It can be a belief system that loses the required element of self-criticism and examination. One could argue that if the science is weak, these assumptions will lead to explanatory problems that will force a revision to a new, better paradigm. But this can also be an excuse for continuing expensive business as usual, rather than a more fundamental self-examination of the way business is being done. In this sense, the characterization of genetics as a religion, while informal is cogent. Here we encounter the social and political aspects of science that Kuhn and subsequent sociologists of science have shown are so important. It must be kept in mind that the ideology of genes-as-everything reflects history in many positive as well as self-interested ways. Genetics has had a phenomenal success in just a century or so, bringing to light much that is fundamental about life but that was previously wholly unknown. The problem is the extent to which this success has led to genes gaining a metaphoric status, built into an axiom of life rather than a component of causation. Because of enthusiasm, wishful thinking, interlocked vested interests, cultural momentum, the difficulty of thinking more broadly, the desire to be prominent, insightful, ‘right’ and so on, and to be able to promise everlasting life with inexhaustible food, the attributes of genetics have converged on the cultural attributes of a religion. Science today
is applying ‘genes’ far above their proper role of causal units, to highly emergent traits for which individual genes are typically not very usefully explanatory or predictive. Indeed, and somewhat ironically, there is now rather widespread activity, perhaps even a somewhat crude or even cruel riposte to attacks by fundamentalist religions, by scientists determined to show that such religions are themselves genetic, that is, that religious beliefs in the theological sense are caused by specific genes. Religion is a human trait, and must be compatible with genes and the other molecules of life, but the degree to which it is meaningfully the result of specific genetic causation is a separate question, which is beyond our scope here. A critic may tend to liken much that is in current genetics to being a commitment to religious dogma, saying that ‘Gene’ is just a new G-word (with a capital “G”) in our culture, and hence genetics as its religion. That is, that the new G-word is basically a substitution that today serves the same sorts of vested material and psychological interests as the old Gword did. As we like to put it, genes are involved in everything, but not everything is ‘genetic.’ nnn Ken Weiss, PhD, is Evan Pugh Professor of Anthropology and Genetics at Penn State University. He writes a regular column on these issues in the journal Evolutionary Anthropology. Anne Buchanan, PhD, is a Senior Research Associate in the Anthropology Department at Penn State. Anne and Ken have co-authored two books about genetics and evolution, the most recent of which is The Mermaid’s Tale (2009), and they blog regularly at a site of the same name.
August-October 2013