New Genetics, New Social Formations

Peter Glasner, Paul Atkinson, Helen Greenslade, Peter Glasner, Paul Atkinson, Helen Greenslade

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134162574
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Genetics in Medicine

New genetic technologies cut across a range of public regulatory domains and private lifeworlds, often appearing to generate an institutional void in response to the complex challenges they pose. As a result, a number of new social formations are being developed to legitimate public engagement and avoid the perceived democratic deficit that may result. Papers in this volume discuss a variety of these manifestations in a global context, including:

• genetic data banks
• committees of inquiry
• non-governmental organisations (NGOs)
• national research laboratories.

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These institutions, across both health and agriculture, are explored in such diverse locations as Amazonia, China, Finland, Israel, the UK and the USA. This volume exhibits a clear thematic coherence around the impact of the new genetics and their associated technologies on new social formations, and the case studies included have a significant international focus, showing a balance between theoretical and empirical approaches in this rapidly changing field.

This innovative new volume will be of interest to postgraduates and professionals in the fields of sociology, social anthropology, science and technology studies, and environmental studies.

1 Introduction

New genetics, new social formations

Peter Glasner and Paul Atkinson

The mapping and sequencing of the genome of human beings and other forms of life in the first decade of the new millennium is leading to a reassessment of genomics as systems biology, with a new emphasis on function rather than structure. The result of this development has been the formation of new kinds of knowledge about living things (sometimes described as the ‘omic’ revolution) with the establishment of new disciplinary boundaries (as, for example, in proteomics), and, significantly, with the development of new intellectual and social spaces within which these events occur. The post-genomic era requires more than just a technical understanding of gene structure and function. New technological options cannot survive without being entrenched in networks of producers, users and various services. A new research system is coming into being centred on the production, use and commodification of genetic knowledge, based on new sets of knowledge, technologies and commodities, and embodying a new set of socio-technical relations involving new groups of actors (Glasner 2002). Innovation, as Brown and Webster (2004: 162) describe it, is a ‘melange of knowledge, technology, organisation and wider socio-political activity’ operating in the complex networks of this new research system. The governance of genomics is being reshaped by a new culture which reflects the changing relationships between government, industry and techno-scientific development (Gottweis 2005). This volume attempts to explore the contours of the new social formations that are co-constructed in, and embodied by, this post-genomic enterprise.

The new biotechnologies are fundamentally constitutive of the biological in that they are both a tool and a part of the process of biological development, resulting in unique configurations of (to follow Latour 1993) hybrid formations. The accepted view of nature–society relations, that society is inherently plastic and pliable while nature is remote and autonomous, is turned on its head. The new biotechnologies have made nature pliable and society remote and difficult to change (Brown and Michael 2004: 15). They are neither simply opposed to nature, nor even external to it. They are clearly still tools that are objects to regulate, produce or regenerate nature. But they are also constitutive of defining nature itself, framing it through active participation (Thacker 2005). In this sense they are part of the process that Jasanoff (2004: 2) describes as the co-production of nature and society. The ways in which the world is apprehended and represented by individuals is inseparable from the ways in which they inhabit it. Socio-technical knowledge thus both ‘embeds and is embedded in social practices, identities, norms, conventions, discourses, instruments and institutions’. Such an approach, while not a fully fledged theory, provides a useful way of organising and interpreting complex phenomena in an area such as biotechnology which is rapidly changing, and has deep moral and ethical, as well as practical implications, for society as a whole.

In their discussion of the ‘risky creatures’ created through, and governing the development of, xenotransplantation technologies, Brown and Michael (2004: 208) highlight the need for new regulatory bodies to reflect, at least in part, some of the crucial features of the new objects of regulation. They suggest that related genetic technologies such as pharmacogenomics, tissue engineering and stem cells also challenge the boundaries of existing institutional corporealities and identities. Tissues and genes are potentially fragmented from conventionally understood species boundaries by new innovations in genomic technologies (Waldby 2002). The products of the innovation process then combine human actors, natural phenomena and socio-technical production in a variety of relatively unstable (in the sense of being continually co-constructed) hybrid social formations (Brown and Webster 2004). Such co-constructions need to be stabilised (albeit only for a short time) if they are to effectively mobilise actors to create novel institutions in the process of innovation. Some of this occurs through the defining ‘intermediaries’ that pass between actors, such as texts (for example scientific papers), things (for example computer software), or skills (for example clinical knowledge). These appear in a variety of contexts, including public engagement, techno-scientific economies, socio-technical platforms and social representations.

The shift from reliable to socially robust knowledge, recognised by Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons (2001), provides examples of both new social formations and the intermediaries that contribute to their stabilisation. Recognising that scientific knowledge is always incomplete knowledge, they argue that it is also always therefore contested knowledge. Techno-sciences, such as the new biotechnologies, illustrate the extent to which the conceptual boundaries within which scientific disputes have conventionally been resolved are now obsolete. While objectivity, proof and verification continue to be valued, these are inextricably entwined with shifting local practices which value them differentially, and are more or less robust and reliable depending on context. Progress is no longer viewed as a linear phenomenon, but messily contingent, co-constructed and contextualised. They describe the new social formations within which science now operates as part of the agora, which facilitates the greater involvement of non-experts in decision-making as an integral part of producing socially robust science.

A variety of new decision-making structures has been harnessed by governments and NGOs to involve the ‘public’ over the last fifty years. These include, among others, deliberative polls, citizens’ juries, consensus conferences, science courts, and focus groups. However, society has developed a number of ways of translating the goals of those in authority into the choices of individuals, effectively acting as a form of social control and a legitimation for commercial interests. In the case of citizens’ juries, for example, a combination of transposing the symbolic baggage associated with the legal framing of the judge and jury system to debates about innovative technologies, and introducing rituals of precision which inadequately mimic those in Courts of Law, serve only to give the appearance of accommodating non-experts into the decision-making process. In effect, these trappings sit comfortably within the existing relations of production and so do little to co-construct a socially robust techno-science (Glasner and Rothman 2004: 111 et seq.).

In part this is due to the creation of an ‘imagined’ public, rooted in persistent concerns about public ignorance, and the public mistrust of science. The continuing reinvention of the ‘deficit model’ depends on the myth that, because publics mistakenly expect certainty and risk from science, science is obliged to delete reference to these in policy debates and focus instead on imagined and unacknowledged audiences (Wynne 2001). It is also due to agencies within science where, following the mapping of the human genome, turf wars continue. These actors are competing not only for positions on the reductionist/determinist and holistic/functionalist spectra, but also for regulatory freedom and financial support. Together, it can be argued, the real character of innovative trajectories has been masked through intermediaries embedded in the public involvement over the introduction of GM food or crops, or the development of downstream therapeutic applications from pharmacogenetic or stem cell technologies (Wynne 2005).

In the United Kingdom, one major attempt to engage a wide variety of people on a complex issue of biotechnology is evaluated by Pidgeon and Poortinga in their chapter on the ‘GM Nation?’ public debate. This was one of a variety of different ways which the UK government used to consider a decision on approving the commercialisation of genetically modified crops. It was unusual in that the results of a public dialogue would be placed alongside more traditional sources of evidence and expertise. The authors compare its findings with those of an extensive survey of a representative sample of British public opinion obtained shortly after the debate concluded. The results of ‘GM Nation?’ are seen as borne out to a greater degree than its critics have suggested, implying that it could form an important intermediary in future large-scale public engagement exercises.

In her chapter, Loes Kater discusses the nature of public participation during the establishment of the UK Stem Cell Bank. She recognises that the precise role played by the ‘public’ remains a contested issue, especially when, as in this case with its associated complex ethical and legal issues, science–society relationships are under strain. She suggests two roles became clearer as the Stem Cell Bank progressed. In one, the ‘public in general’ was enrolled in the Bank’s emerging network of allies. In the second, a process of consultation took place, specifically through the intervention of the British Medical Research Council, aimed at ‘specific publics’. Kater concludes, however, that with regard to the ‘public in general’ it was only representations of public expectations that were enrolled – effectively creating just the sort of intermediary discussed by Wynne (2005). The consultation with more specific public groups on the other hand at least allowed for a more interactive dialogue where real differences could be allowed to surface.

Rogers-Hayden and Jones also argue for a more reflexive approach to public engagement in their comparison between Canada and New Zealand of their Commissions on reproductive technologies and genetically modified organisms respectively. The authors chart the many similarities between the two exercises while recognising the inherent limitations of Commissions as a means of engaging the public in decision-making. They conclude that overcoming the modernist premise on which Commissions are based by embedding ‘reflexive, human-based values’ early into their design may serve to produce the necessary new social formations required by contemporary liberal democracies.

One of the premises highlighted during the Commission debates in both countries was that of the precautionary principle. In their fine-grained analysis of its role in the trial of anti-GM activists following their destruction of GM crops, Ujita and her colleagues show how the institutional setting of the court modified the way in which actors shaped their views and arguments. They suggest that such trials serve an important symbolic function in policy-making, particularly for the activists, who can use them as platforms for disseminating their views. Hence, while not necessarily an ideal forum for public debate, such trials, and the way in which the precautionary principle is played out in them, provide interesting examples of one agora as identified by Nowotny et al. (2001).

Globalisation has highlighted the need to recognise that markets in scientific and technological downstream applications from genomic innovations exhibit similar characteristics to existing markets in the wider knowledge economy (Glasner and Rothman 2004). There has been an enormous increase in the codification of knowledge, which, together with networks and the digitalisation of information, is leading to its increasing commodification. There is increasing interdependence of international flows of goods and services, direct investment, and technology and capital transfers associated with increasing specialisation, and chains of production crossing international boundaries (Appadurai 1996). There is a substantial national and regional structural adjustment, with an emphasis on flexibility and networking built through. Time has now become, alongside knowledge, a new factor of production, essentially compressing and reordering existing conceptions of what is understood by the production process as shown in the freezing or banking of ‘immortal’ stem cell lines (Glasner 2005). Together, these elements suggest that the transition to a knowledge-based economy is so fundamentally different from the resource-based system of the last century that conventional economic understanding must be re-examined (Barry and Slater 2005).

Birch uses the ongoing construction of a multi-national biotech industry to illustrate these developments in the knowledge-based economy. He argues that the USA constructed a global market through deliberate changes to law and industrial policy designed to benefit its local industry and national interest. The resultant changes, first to national, and subsequently to international definitions of patentability, have resulted in financial accumulation and economic growth at a disproportionate level suggesting that any study of the knowledge-based economy must consider its wider social and cultural relations. Today, the gap between the richer nations of the global North and the poorer ones in the South is increasing just as rapidly in biotechnology and its applications as elsewhere. These global divisions have been exacerbated as huge transnational biotechnology corporations have developed from mergers and acquisitions, located mainly in Europe and North America. The top five biotech companies now own about 95 per cent of all gene transfer patents. Global governance agreements such as TRIPS form intermediaries which co-construct both innovative scientific developments and their applications.

This suggests a need to focus on the issues of control, access and influence over agendas for the future innovation and exploitation of the new genetic technologies that such a polarisation implies. Such issues are firmly embedded within a variety of commercial, regulatory and governmental institutions. Oldham uses the debates surrounding biodiversity and intellectual property to discuss biopiracy and the bioeconomy. He identifies the emergence of the ‘bioeconomy’ as a result of the growing convergence between the biosciences (widely drawn) and broader local and global regulatory processes. Focusing on the Convention on Biological Diversity as a new social formation configured in a variety of ways, he suggests that the contested area of intellectual property rights has served to encourage biopiracy rather than the benefit sharing stated in its aims.

Kang, in her chapter on patenting human genetic material and information, questions the appropriateness of using a utilitarian economic justification in the equation that trades temporary monopoly rights to the patentee with free use of a patented invention by the public. She suggests, using the example of Moore v the Regents of the University of California, that current patent law constructs the human subject as a thing rather than a person in order for it to be an object of property relations. This process produces new legal objects that reside in the space between the legal and techno-scientific practices that take the human body as their object of knowledge. As a result human agents cease to be the primary field for study, to be replaced by a focus on the mediated relationships between self and the social networks within which the self is situated.

Sleeboom-Faulkner also discusses identity formation in the context of the new genetics, in her analysis of genetic population mapping in the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan. However, the findings from such studies are not only contentious in themselves (as, for example, in the Human Genome Diversity Project), but generate disputes on aboriginal rights to territory, resources and self-determination. She suggests that, for some, the Taiwanese have become perceived as indigenous populations (isolates of historic interest) in the political sense. Clearly this perception of a Taiwanese identity is constructed both internally, and outwith the island using socio-cultural as well as genetic resources not limited just to the Chinese peoples. Its changing role as a hybrid formation is closely related to similar discussions about national identity on mainland China.

Styles of practice in the investigation of research problems, the results that are generated, and the ways in which the process is regulated, produce distinctive and novel institutional, epistemic and material configurations. In the case of biomedical advance, Keating and Cambrosio (2003) have suggested the term ‘biomedical platform’ to cover the range of activities in contemporary biomedicine, ranging from laboratory research to clinical trials and routine diagnosis. In a study of changing diagnoses of lymphoid tumours, for example, they show how three distinctive approaches (the morphological, immunophenotypic and molecular genetic) emerge chronologically, but do not result in the replacement of an earlier by a later platform. New platforms are integrated into an expanding set of clinical-biological strategies through complex realignments and articulations with earlier ones. However the key to how a new diagnostic platform is held together in practice is to be found in the protocols that specify inter alia sufficient sensitivity, specificity, reproducibility, robustness, reliability, accuracy, precision and clinical relevance – or, more broadly, regulation (Keating and Cambrosio 2004: 39). The development and approval of a regulatory protocol is itself a highly political process almost as complex as the application of the protocol itself.

Angela Procoli focuses on the new forms of knowledge production discussed by Nowotny and her colleagues. She uses her anthropologically informed methodology to analyse three case studies within the French scientific community: surface scientists, geneticists and breeders, and quantitative and molecular scientists. She suggests that the boundaries of these groups are as much produced by economic, social and cultural forces from outside in the wider society, as they are from within. This occurs as a result of such communities becoming ‘hybrid fora’ made up from local and professional groups as well as the scientists themselves. These groups bear many similarities to the bio-medical platforms suggested by Keating and Cambrosio.

In his chapter on bioinformatics challenge, Henrik Bruun identifies bioinformatics tools for the storage, manipulation and analysis of data as the basis for functional genomics, proteomics, and many other new research platforms in the bio-sciences. He discusses a particular research platform based on the use of micro-arrays, as a case study of the challenges faced by the ‘new biology’. His approach illustrates the need to focus on transformations with educational, cognitive, epistemological and practical research implications for organisations, institutions, and for the scientists themselves. Bruun concludes that genomics is indeed undergoing a transformation in knowledge production, even though practices integrating bio-informatics into the laboratory vary greatly between laboratories.

Studies drawn from such areas as literary theory, deconstructionist methodologies and the sociology of scientific knowledge have shown how scientific rhetoric and forms of discourse contribute to legitimating scientific authority in complex social contexts (Lewenstein 1995; Miller et al. 1998). In tracing the patterns of representation of genomics across a range of media forms, and reviewing and reassessing broad conceptualisations concerning science on and in the media, it is possible to identify specific patterns with regard to genomics. This involves consolidating insights about key nodes of media theory, pertaining to textual analysis, including: genre, narrative continuities and transformations across media forms, iconic imagery, spectacle, and national and international specificities. It also involves explorations of the production and consumption of representations, where theories of media production, identification, audience and risk come into focus. Theories of globalisation and the internationalisation of media forms therefore also come under scrutiny, with explication of some national issues that are crucial in understanding contemporary public science.

The chapter by Kitzinger and her colleagues suggests, through a broad investigation of genomics, a theoretical framework for understanding genomics as a public and mediated science. This involves new insights about the relation between science, media and ‘the public’, serving to reconfigure understandings of public engagements with genomics and other sciences. As a case study, they examine the ways in which the embryo is imagined, visualised and represented in controversies over stem cell research, particularly in relation to a series of ‘breakthroughs’ between 2000 and 2005. What counts as an embryo has become a contested intermediary, with both proponents and critics of stem cell research mobilising metaphors and personifications through visual representations of its origins, destiny and death to attempt stabilisation. This occurs within a ‘balanced’ media coverage that uses ‘breakthrough’ science to systematically disregard ...