Biological samples collected from indigenous communities from the mid-20th century for scientific study and preserved in freezers of the Global North have been at the center of a number of controversies. This essay explores why the problem of indigenous biospecimens has returned to critical attention frequently over the past two decades, and why and how Science and Technology Studies should attend to this problem. We propose that mutation -the variously advantageous, deleterious, or neutral mechanism of biological change -can provide a conceptual and analogical resource for reckoning with unexpected problems created by the persistence of frozen indigenous biospecimens. Mutations transcend dichotomies of premodern/modern, pro-science/antiscience, and north/south, inviting us to focus on entanglements and interdependencies. Freezing biospecimens induces mutations in indigenous populations, in the scientists who collected and stored such specimens, and in the specimens themselves. The jumbling of timescales introduced by practices of freezing generates new ethical problems: problems that become ever more acute as the supposed immortality of frozen samples meets the mortality of the scientists who maintain them. More broadly, we propose that an 'abductive' approach to Science and Technology Article 466
Social Studies of Science 43(4)Studies theories of co-production can direct attention to the work of temporality in the ongoing alignment of social and technical orders. Attending to the unfolding and mutating vital legacies of indigenous body parts, collected in one time and place and reused in others, reveals the enduring colonial dimensions of scientific practice in our global age and demonstrates new openings for ethical action. Finally, we outline the articles in this special issue and their respective 'mutations' to postcolonial Science and Technology Studies, a field that, like genome science, is racked with ethical and temporal dilemmas of reckoning for the past in the present.
In the last few years, justice has emerged as a matter of concern for the contemporary constitution of technoscience. Increasingly, both practicing scientists and engineers and scholars of science and technology cite justice as an organizing theme of their work. In this essay, I consider why “science and justice” might be arising now. I then ask after the opportunities, but also the dangers, of this formation. By way of example, I explore the openings and exclusions created by the recent conjugation of science and justice in the field of personal genomics. Finally, I conclude with reflections on what other forms “science and justice” might take, and what might be gained or lost in fostering them.
The opening decade of this millennium witnessed genome scientists, policy makers, critical race theorists and world leaders standing together to pronounce the antiracist democratic potential of human genomics. Understanding and assessing this rise of 'anti-racist, democratic genomics' requires distinguishing between two problems of power and science: the first characterized by what Michel Foucault labeled states of domination; the second by what he described as relations of power. When states of domination exist, as in the case of Nazi science, liberal efforts to extend new powers of participation and autonomy to research subjects may play important roles in redressing power imbalances between researchers and their subjects. However, when distinctions between scientist and research subject blur, as in the case of much human genomics, efforts to extend liberal rights to subjects of genomic studies-or genomic liberalism-may produce novel problems, including: (1) human genome scientists' loss of capacity to describe their objects of study; (2) disruption of research subjects' abilities to define themselves; and (3) lack of accountability for the unintended effects of efforts to democratize genomics. In these ways genomic liberalism may foster, at the same that it impedes, the co-constitution of knowledge and democratic subjects. It may create new forms of racism at the very moment that it explicitly seeks anti-racist ends. Addressing the problems created by this paradoxical position will require more sustained attention to and critique of the antiracist and democratic imaginaries that increasingly animate technoscience.
jenny reardon is Assistant Research Professor of Women's Studies and Scholar in Genome Sciences and Policy at Duke University. In the academic year 2004-2005 she will be a Scholar in Residence at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University. Her book Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics is forthcoming with Princeton University Press in December of 2004.
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