Biotechnology, Education and Life Politics

Debating genetic futures from school to society

Pádraig Murphy

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415707350
• eBook ISBN: 9781134592920
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

What should individuals and society do when genetic screening becomes widely available and with its impact on current and future generations still uncertain? How can our education systems around the world respond to these developments?

Reproductive and genetic technologies (RGTs) are increasingly controversial and political. We are entering an era where we can design future humans, firstly, by genetic screening of "undesirable" traits or indeed embryos, but perhaps later by more radical genetic engineering. This has a profound effect on what we see as normal, acceptable and responsible.

This book argues that these urgent and biopolitical issues should be central to how biology is taught as a subject. Debate about life itself has always been at the forefront of connected molecular, genetic and social/personal identity levels, and each of these levels requires processes of communication and debate, what Anthony Giddens called in passing life politics. In this book Pádraig Murphy opens the term up, with examples from field research in schools, student responses to educational films exploring the future of RGTs, and science studies of strategic biotechnology and the lab practices of genetic screening. Life political debate is thoroughly examined and is identified as a way of connecting mainstream education of biology with future generations.

Biotechnology, Education and Life Politics will appeal to post-graduates and academics involved with science education, science communication, communication studies and the sociology of education.

Chapter 1

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Introduction

Biopolitical control and the possibilities for life political education

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Our lives today are controlled as much by the discourses of human biology as they are by biology itself. ‘Biology’ sounds as controlling as it sounds educational but learning science is not a passive exercise for our young anymore. Nor is it for adults. Science is a critical business in every sense of these words. The sciences and technologies that relate to understanding, creating and developing human life are particularly critical. We are beginning to have the power to alter the genetic make-up of the next generation of humans without traditional methods of reproduction, through decision-making at the embryo stages or direct engineering of the genes to prevent disease in the next generation. Or perhaps for other reasons. There now exists a mix of biological knowledge domains and the social application of this knowledge through modern biotechnology. It is a mixture of both science and discourse. We learn it, we learn from it, we use it, and experience it and respond to it – as animals of course – and much of what we know will change rapidly. I will get back to forms of discourse in contexts most useful to this book later, but let us remain with one common idea of discourse: discussion. The discussion drives the act, which in turn drives the discussion. They become inseparable. Fundamentally, we are changed by, and can change, our biology. This may be the real beginnings of the earliest time we humans can change our future biology, and it may seem like a frightening future. In other contexts besides biological knowledge, we may say that we are burdening our children with a bad legacy of financial debt or with environmental disaster. But it is beyond mere legacy – it is their future. Likewise, genetic screening or genetic engineering as well as the surrounding regulatory regimes, the ethical statements and debates, become our future generations.

Can we select the genetic make-up of our children, to develop further the concept of the so-called ‘designer baby’, and should we be allowed to were it feasible in a complete sense? Will it be a free or costly choice like many others in the near future? If there is disagreement with these methods on moral or legal grounds, then begins a discussion, the grounds and means for debate. What if one embryo is chosen over others? How does this square with attitudes to, and regulation for, abortion? How will it be understood and governed by our children? Discussion in such a controversial domain inevitably leads to political debate, in a real sense, perhaps leading to regulatory change. Inevitably, there are strong feelings of politics and passion around germline genetics and embryos (Fukuyama, 2002; Habermas, 2003; McDonnell and Allison, 2006; Stock, 2002). It will continue to be a hot topic in Ireland way beyond the time of writing. This book will explore its global significance by focusing on its implications for future education.

After debate and demonstration, we can then move forward. ‘Demonstration’, is what Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars Andrew Barry and Michel Callon call the re-presenting and resisting, the political clash, action in need of an audience, requiring media (Callon, 2004, citing Barry, 2001). The biosciences commonly use systems of internal scientific discussion or external public debates and debate and argument is central to good science, to good teaching and to good politics. Finding out past genetic histories and future probabilities of disease and life chances, ultimately discussion and debate caught in spheres and sites of thought help create a future. Are we ready for a future that brings about significant changes to the human species, or with new traits (Fukuyama, 2002; Stock, 2002)? In the summer of 2012, peak UK viewership for Channel 4 coverage of the Paralympics rose to 5.7 million people (Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board, 2012). They watched London on their TV screens, many in amazement, perhaps for the first time realising the wonder of paralympian endeavour. Young people were hopefully inspired by these triumphs over adversity. But are processes of genetic selection of embryos a means of removing this adversity? To be a paralympian means years of training and sacrifice. If embryo selection were prevalent for a range of perceived disorders, would we no longer have ‘natural’ paralympians? What normative and lab practice decision-making is crucial to the separation of embryos into the ‘future potential sick’ and the ‘future potential well’? So an affirmative biology is, in a way, created around these types of questions and robust propositions, as they occur in books, at the lab bench sometimes, or perhaps even through the data from a computer model; but most likely in the vocalised debates that occur in the TV or radio studio, the courtroom, in parliament, in the boardroom, the internet chatroom, the lecture hall or classroom. This, shall we call it, proactive biology may lead us to acceptance, perhaps rejection, of radical technologies that change our lifestyles, practices, our sense of morality, our relationships with an ideal of Nature or Politics, our being, who we are, and who we may be, and to whom or what we connect. But we debate it all too seldom. We are part of biology-as-discourse from the beginning for our citizens in the secondary or high school classroom, and how we might see, debate and shape the future (so often in these contexts, unfortunately, the Great Western ‘We’).

Central to these debates is a public type of science communication, a public pedagogical communication. Pedagogy, as used in this book, is quite an academic term. I use it instead of the less nuanced word ‘teaching’ to exposit how the study of teaching and learning might respond to this biological-discourse control. Also used is the specific example of teaching through social and decision-making arguments about the many reproductive and genetic technologies (RGTs) that are emerging, like genetic screening, therapeutic and reproductive cloning and human stem cell research. There is a much broader concept of teaching at work here. We need our next generations to know, and be involved with, these debates. Science education, and the science teacher specifically, has rarely had the opportunity – nor indeed the professional incentive – to pause and give serious thought about the profundity of bioethics, the sequestered taboo of what has come to be known as biopolitics, controlling body and life processes, the strategic funding and political mechanism of genetics and genomics, or the possibility that genetic screening may ‘always already’ (Fuller, 2011) be veering toward eugenics. Indeed how could, or should, teaching staff ever need to know about the new outlandish landscapes of the posthumanities (Agamben, 1998, 2000; Campbell, 2011; Esposito, 2008)? This is different than modernity, the project of progress. Is this all too alien for the science classroom?

It is proposed in this book that education of young people is the starting point of this new public biology pedagogy, by learning science through argument and opinion-development, the tools of rhetoric and politics. Life politics is the concept I have chosen to demonstrate this, as put forward by the sociologist Anthony Giddens (1991). Life politics is not just political action around life processes such as embryo technologies, gene selection or genetic engineering. The description ‘life’ makes a positive statement, whereas ‘bio’ is a clinical scientific signifier that can also become a prefix of fear, with the exception of words like bio-degradable and biofuel, many others carry the risk factor – ‘biohazard’, ‘bio-terrorism’, even ‘biotechnology’ itself. Biopolitics has a history in theory suggesting control, while life politics is a fight back from below. Life politics also consists of life-planning and future living (ibid.), habitats, societies and cities, how personal style and public politics are intertwined (ibid.). Life politics in this context can challenge a social engineering that might misuse genetics in society, or enforce forms of eugenics, the supposed progressive assistance to human evolution developed by early biological engineers of society (that is, social order), William Paley and Thomas Malthus (Fuller, 2011). Paley was seen as an early proponent of universal design in theology. Malthus brought the world to account on its expectation of unlimited resources for non-interrupted global population growth. This is a life politics beyond the life sciences. It is not enough to learn content, to practise science from the school lab. We will get glimpses in this book of how inadequate this is when faced with the real politics and crisis of existential shock and the need to act when faced with serious illness or affliction in the next generations. This is a teaching, learning and public pedagogy that moves these associated issues of human design, finitude, birth, disability and abortion into society, away from ‘bioethics’ and into education as politics, as argument, as transferrable communication skills. Crudely described, it is TEDx biology.

This combined science and politics – for all that is presented to us in science and media, from pharmaceutical industry content, from business drivers or from misconduct cases or self-diagnostic manuals, or even CERN discoveries and novel crops – has science not been presented within society as ‘fact’, as distinct from ‘mere opinion’? Not if we look more deeply at these issues from the previous sentence again – the biosciences have already been immersed in opinion and politics. The fields of Science and Technology Studies, and new thinking in science communication based on solid research, show us that the context, emotion, affectivity, rhetoric and style re-presented are just as important to the teaching and understanding of science as the content (see Ziman (1996), Merton (1973), all the way through to Latour (1993), Haraway (1997), Ravetz (2005, 2006) and Fuller (2010, 2011)). This is a direct result of the messy, social nature of current science and technology. Argumentation, reasoning, persuading, but also controversy. Historically, the discursive side of argumentation for bioscience knowledge has immense importance. It is loquutio, speech that determines ‘what is useful and what is harmful’, separating the ‘just’ from the ‘unjust’ which has occurred from Aristotle to Aquinas or the mediaeval scientia which were persuasive forms of knowledge presented through thought experiments (Fuller and Collier, 2008). Politics demands a series of solutions to problems; argument is just the beginning of this process. Giddens’ life politics tells us that technical processes since the Enlightenment have forced the removal of the taboo from our daily discourse, the unclinical, the messy. However the messiness forces its way back in. Life politics forces us to choose, because it is the politics of choices which easily applies to issues of life itself such as end-of-life, beginnings of life issues and the ethics of life processes. Through these the taboo and the socially hidden re-emerge. It takes realpolitik and a critical pedagogy to deal with the mess (Giddens, 1991).

The TED mode of pedagogy is with us, but there is more disruption, more need of debate. We are now in the era of what has become known as germline technologies or inheritable genetic modification (IGM) – changes in genes of offspring that will carry on into future generations. The term reproductive and genetic technologies (RGTs) is used quite frequently in this book, a collective term borrowed partly from anthropologist Jeannette Edwards (2002). These include IVF, genetic screening, therapeutic cloning of embryos, but could also include other forms of genetic enhancement and genetically-modified organisms (GMOs). The main focus here are those methods by which a sufferer or carrier of a genetic disease may eradicate it completely from future offspring. This is the domain of pre-implantation screening (PGS) – where searches are made for broad genetic deletions and anomalies which increase the risk of miscarriage – and preimplantation diagnosis (PGD) – targeted screening to find a specific set of genes. Biopsies are carried out in fertility clinics and the embryo or blastocyst (Chang et al., 2011). However, any genetic change in an individual embryo for the future person also impacts on future generations. Testing occurs in molecular genetic material, so the cystoplasm is involved as well as the nucleus. In fact, in terms of where research is going, the gene is not even where it is at anymore. Much of the technology has moved from DNA in the nucleus out to the cell itself, in areas known as epigenetics¹ and in proteonomics where proteins’ role in disease are studied. Molecular genetic testing is commonly requested for diseases such as cystic fibrosis, Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, Huntingdon Disease, and Fragile X Syndrome (Barton, 2012). A less common disease, Friedreich’s ataxia, or FRDA, is the main genetic-linked disease covered in this book.

This is no longer a time of In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) and assisted reproductive technology (ART) techniques; that is, of technological contraception, helping women to conceive through technology. New contraceptive controls emerging in the 1960s were so much a liberatory force for change for the feminist movement, in Ireland as elsewhere, yet also paradoxically, feminist theories warn us, this was the beginning of a structural technoscientific invasiveness of the woman’s body (Edwards, 1999a, 1999b, 2002; Franklin, 1999, 2003, 2006; Strathern, 1996) (also see Haraway (1991) and Harding (1986) for broader feminists approach to technoscience). We have gone much further. IVF was a first step, now a relatively routine procedure, for clinicians and doctors, if not for couples or individuals seeking this service (Inhorn and Birenbaum-Carmeli, 2008; Slowther, 2008). Other techniques may also soon become part of routine choice for society – gene therapy, which is a germline modification (effecting the gamete, that is the sperm or egg) or somatic (all other cells of the body). Latest developments have also included human embryonic stem (ES) cell for research and potential treatment. Feminist critiques of these technologies contest the patriarchy of the ideals of kinship (Edwards, 1999a, 1999b, 2002; Franklin, 1999; Haraway, 1997), but also the issues of an all-controlling technology, what De Certeau (1984) might call technology as strategy, the totalising power of ‘the Proper’.

Cloning, for example, is a disruptive idea in popular culture and society. Parthenogenesis is the scientific term but the popular culture and literary idea for humans is the double, twin, copy, the doppelganger or a too-familiar other, or closer than that, a non-I or a second self. In biotechnology practice, cloning is a common process of replicating a cell. Under laboratory conditions, fragments of DNA, promoters or molecules can be replicated and done so quite radically using a process called polymerase chain reaction (PCR) used in forensic investigations where there are DNA traces. The media coverage often centres on a process called somatic-cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) (Kfoury, 2007), but more commonly known as cloning, either human reproductive or therapeutic (ibid.; Tannert, 2006). In therapeutic cloning, nuclear material is transferred from a somatic cell to an oocyte (egg) where the nucleus is removed with the aim of multiplying up cells with the same genome as the nuclear donor (Kfoury, 2007; Hayry, 2003). Reproductive cloning of humans, for issues of safety as well as ethics, is universally banned. Some cloning of animals has taken place, most famously Dolly the sheep in 1996. Therapeutic cloning has been considered for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and Duchennes muscular dystrophy. Embryonic cells are quite potent, or pluripotent, essentially more malleable and programmable, with the potential to be converted into a range of important body (somatic, or non-sexual) cells. Genetic screening by means of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) is a technique where there is screening of embryos for a prospective parent, offering the patient the opportunity to make reproductive choices – choosing which embryos or whether or not to allow a particular embryo to go full term. Both of these latter RGTs will be a particular focus here, as the concepts were explored as a topic of discussion with young people, as well as their scoping of future humanity, compositions (Latour, 2010), their mangles of practice (Pickering, 1993) through education and politics covered throughout this book.

There is a life politics around us and it is not just a political science of life. When Anthony Giddens defined life politics, he was describing life-planning, where personal life and public play become blurred, an extension of twentiethcentury emancipatory struggles of race, gender, sexuality, environment and worker’s rights into embodied self-actualisation and a new supposed autonomy and authenticity for the Modern Self (Giddens, 1991). Although not well theorized in Modernity and Self-Identity, he meant, to a lesser degree, RGTs (ibid. 217–23). What could be more political and less coldly bio-educational than changing the human species?

And then there is Latour’s odd notion of a once and future parliament, a Parliament of Things, made up of our propositions and vision ‘things’ and objects (a very specific reading of a ‘thing’, a partial object read and enacted in multiple ways) (Latour, 1993, 2004a). Odd though it may be, we will be giving this notion particular attention in this book, a politics beneath the nationa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations and glossary
• 1 Introduction: Biopolitical control and the possibilities for life political education
• 2 Biopolitics and state in education
• 3 Biopinion
• 4 Future scripts and present bodies
• 5 The bios in education
• 6 ‘Political’ science and framing: An education from media
• 7 Nine genetic futures
• 8 Life politics
• Appendix: Wellcome Trust film debate activities
• Bibliography
• Index