Entering the Conversation

I came away from Salter's Global Politics.. with a sense that there's been a general shift in HESC science towards increased public involvement, specifically in the area of government funding of HESC research, and through a heavier reliance on bioethics committees to enable compromises between the 'actors' of our bioscience model. Good news, indeed, especially if these ethics committees are inclined to act as conscientious, accountable intermediaries between the public and the other actors.

Last night I decided to stop researching and start organizing this paper. It's dawning on me that, much like recording an album, there comes a point in the writing/research process when you have to say enough- it's time to move on to the next stage. I wanted to use this last reflection as a warm up, to explore some solid writing techniques that we've witnessed this term. Now that we've finished Promising Genomics and we prepare to "enter the conversation" via our projects, it seems appropriate to take a closer look at Fortun's style and strategies. But first, here's a snippet from the intro of Graff & Birkenstein's They Say, I Say:

"Accomplished writers routinely rely on a stock of established moves that are crucial for communicating sophisticated ideas. What makes writers masters of their trade is not only their ability to express interesting thoughts, but their mastery of an inventory of basic moves that they probably picked up by reading a wide range of other accomplished writers" (1).

Fortun certainly comes to mind as someone who, to paraphrase the above minigraph, 'makes it look easy.' What are his stylistic and rhetorical techniques, his basic moves? Over the course of our readings, I observed that Fortun:

-often takes his time getting to the heart of his arguments. At the beginning of the book, this technique tested my patience somewhat, though I came to appreciate the depth of understanding the strategy affords as we continued reading.

-offers up a variety of evidence to support his claims- sometimes truckloads of it. When Fortun did employ an "overkill" strategy, he seemed to have made the choice consciously, as a way of emphasizing the strength of his position. I appreciated these moves, and rarely if ever felt that he was overstating things.

-writes as though speaking. He strikes a good balance between knowing when to make his presence felt, and when to back himself off to let the facts do the work.

-plays skillfully yet freely with language, and by doing so creates new ideas, ways of thinking, and frames.

-doesn't shy away from academic speak when it's necessary, nor does he hesitate to use what I assume to be his own colloquial language. Often, these divergent voices could be found entwined in the same paragraph, or even the same sentence: an unsettling, thought-provoking effect.

-organizes his chapters and arguments in a methodical, straightforward, transparent way. It's ironic that the concept of the chiasma and its related morphological thisxthat construction, so challenging to grasp at the beginning of Promising, serve as convenient way to title chapters, by indexing the main topics at play.

Time to start reading and highlighting....

Frame that embryo/Literary Economics

Like several of my classmates, I wondered why the group of sociologists who penned Human Embryos as boundary objects? had felt the need to meticulously construct what appears on the surface to be a slam-dunk argument: that "affected" (rejected) embryos from PGD laboratories could and should be made available for use in ESC research projects. After all, ESC scientists would only be "taking material that's going to be destroyed and... trying to create therapies out of that" (9). Here is where we can really see Green's analyses of the volatile and deeply inconsistent politicization of embroys in Embryo as epiphenomenon working to help us better understand the religio-cultural terrain of the debate. Many conservatives overlook the destruction of human embryos that occur as part of the IVF process, while they bemoan the use of such 'doomed' embryos in stem-cell research; in short, "opposing those who would privilege scientific progress and individual choice over the sanctity of family life and traditional family roles" (841). The reasons underlying the dichotomy- and some would add, the hypocrisy- of "pro-life" outrage are more likely to be discovered from a religio-cultural framing of the debate, by allowing for what Green calls the "deeper value conflicts," than from a more academic bioethical framing.

* * * * *

Few things written on the backs of album covers* have struck me as profoundly as this sentence: "Art is a science having more than seven variables." Maybe Fortun is proposing that we improve upon the disclosure mechanisms of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission by reconsidering the administration of the economic system as an art rather than as a science. Leaning heavily on the writing of Charles Kindleberger, he offers this:

"To describe what governments or banks must do to respond well to speculative excess... a 'neat trick' has to be performed, a 'sleight of hand' [whereby] the 'lender of last resort'- who must exist, but whose 'presence should be doubted'- must 'always come to the rescue... but always leave it uncertain whether rescue will arrive in time or at all, so as to instill caution in other speculators, banks, cities, or countries' "(194).

This theory of "literary economics," which I'm pretty sure even Fortun would agree is half-baked as it appears in his book, is nonetheless intriguing. How would a USCEC (my acronym) based on a chiasmic, doubtfulXcertain "foundation without foundation" model actually function? And what the hell is the model, anyway? This is some serious voodoo economics.

*A notable exception, which I'm sharing just for fun, can be found at the very end of the liner notes in Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music: "My week beats your year." Go get em, Lou.

Let's Keep the Punches Above the Belt, People

I appreciated the "cultureXreligion in flux" analysis of Epiphenomenon, as well as Devolder & Harris' rhetorical passion (ire?). Reading through these papers, however, I quickly realized how so many religious people could resent the attitudes of scientists and bioethicists, specifically in reference to the stem cell debate. While I agree with most of the points these two articles forward, both articles somewhat misrepresent one of the main arguments against allowing scientific research that utilizes human embryos: namely, that it is wrong to destroy a human blastocyst. Green seems to twist this argument to mean that it is likewise morally wrong to NOT rescue every embryo possible, regardless of the reason for "arrest":

"[I]t has long been known that there is an extremely high rate of embryo loss associated with conception and pregnancy... at least half of all fertilised human ova arrest somewhere in early development... [T]his amounts to the catastrophic loss of perhaps a hundred million "human" lives worldwide each year. Yet no one in the global health establishment of a US administration has ever proposed devoting significant research funding to address this problem" (840).

Condoning the dissection and destruction of human embryos in laboratories is one thing; allowing the natural mechanisms of intrauterine embryonic implantation and arrest to take their course is quite another. It only weakens Green's position to confuse the two. Devolder & Harris take a similar straw-manning stance:

"IVF could... be combined with the possibility to grow embryos to term in artificial wombs, which, when perfected will offer a safer environment for the embryo than a woman's womb... Would "pro-lifers" support these technologies? It looks as though there would indeed be a strong moral obligation to abandon sexual procreation and use only embryo-sparing ART (assisted reproduction technologies)" (163).

Unsurprisingly, it wasn't hard to notice a palpable contempt for the religious 'right to life' perspective in these papers, particularly in one passage of Ambiguity, where Devolder & Harris skewer conservative's use of the 'pro-life' moniker:

"We say inappropriately termed "pro-life" because those who regard themselves as "pro-life" so often support positions that can only be thought of as anti-life and that moreover are profligate of human life and safety" (163).

Apart from the fallacious logic of the first two passages, I found both articles solidly well-reasoned. The stab at the ridiculousness of the title "pro-life" only made me smile.

Intoxication of the Promise

Confession: I watched Free Willy with my daughter last week, thinking that I was perhaps killing two birds with one orca-shaped stone. I'll call the exercise {quality family time}X{a 112 minute dive down a doubtfully but potentially valuable rabbit hole}. Sad to say, as a means to more thoroughly understand Fortun's ethnographical adventuring, Free Willy was a flop. My daughter enjoyed it, though, so it wasn't a total waste of time.

The excellent excerpts from The Atom Station we've read prompted me to check a few facts on the internet. It turns out that Iceland's 20th century wasn't as tumult-free as I'd imagined. In 1940, the ísland experienced a real British invasion (Operation Fork), followed by an US-led Allied occupation until the end of WWII. Directly after the war, controversy over Iceland's joining NATO let to mass rioting and demonstrating.

I digress, but purposefully. The section on W.H. Auden's visit to Iceland is, like the latter of the two aforementioned events, illustrative of an underlying political shiftiness. At the start of Ch. 9, Fortun likens his motivations for escaping to Iceland to those of Auden's. He also implies that they were both wrong in supposing they would find asylum from the lunacy of their respective lives, as Iceland's 'promise' of isolation, and of freedom from politics, proves illusory: "Any fantasy that I had of fueling enthusiasm while avoiding politics in Iceland... quickly proved unsustainable" (83). Picking up where he left off in Ch. 4, Fortun continues exploring the meaning and worth of other, equally vague promises. I appreciated Fortun's dissection of Gudmundsson's perplexing, mystical statement on the importance of the HSD legislation (87), elucidating the wild contradictions of then-director general of Iceland's public health system. Even more scandalous is the off-the-cuff quasi-racist remarks of then-prime minister Oddsson, extolling what he describes as submission to authority (though he calls it "trust") as one of Iceland's national treasures (92-3).

Personally, I'm most intrigued by the intoxicating aspect of the myriad promises that surrounded the creation of the HSD, and how this inebriation affected many people's ability to think and speak clearly about it. We can find a good example of this kind of romantic vision at the dawn of Fortun's book, in the Roche press release (2), where promises and potentials of the future benefits of the HSD are proof enough for those in power. I'm eager to start chasing the trail of money between the companies and the Alþingi, to find out just how much these tipsy promises cost. Hopefully Fortun decides to shed some light here.

The Heart

At the time that I wrote my last Biopolitics reflection- some years ago- I hadn't yet read Brown's "Three Ways to Politicize Bioethics." Hilarious, then, that his article would not only echo my reservations with communitarianism's romantic naïveté, but also suggest ways to integrate what I saw as its positives (most notably its emphasis on public participation, board accountability, and contestability of board decisions), while eschewing its stricter, consensus-bound elements.

Both liberalism and communitarianism seek to avoid "little-p" politics altogether, albeit in vastly different ways. Whereas the liberalist seeks to reduce public participation by limiting the participants to members of "interested" groups of experts and vested capitalists, the communitarian strives to level the playing field so far as to make power play unnecessary, "irrelevant" (Brown 48). Forging the strengths of these two flawed extremes, republicanism's ideals bring to mind the overarching moral of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927), gloriously revealed in the final minutes of the film:

"The mediator between head and hands must be the heart!"

And here I am accusing Callahan of romanticism.

The mediator, or 'heart,' in my hypothetical (hypopoetical?) case would be the bioethics council functioning under the republicanist model. The designation of 'head' goes to the policymaking bodiesxindividuals, with the 'hands' nicely representing the Public. Extending application of the metaphor to liberalism and communitarianism, I'd argue that the former attempts to nullify the role of the hands, while the latter attempts to obliterate the difference between hands and head. Reading film critic Constantinos Kolios' opinion of Metropolis, it's clear that many of the deeply human questions posed by the film are similar to those that a committed, rigorous and thorough bioethics body would consider. Quoting directly from Kolios' review:

"What makes Metropolis so profound? Metropolis succeeds in posing far more questions than it answers.

~ How has technology affected our lives?
~ Does technology dehumanize us?
~ Is technology evil? Or just how we use it?
~ Are we now forever dependent on our technology?
~ What does that make of us?"

Reading the third chapter in Promising Genomics (FastxFast), I was struck by the apparent absence of any clear ethical protocol applied to the knee-jerk decisions made by the newly emergent genomics companies. Fortun speeds us through the not-so-solid histories of a few of these cash-hungry baby firms, describing the hurried sales of genetic databases, where million$ are exchanged for a shot at profiting off the possible realization of a handful of haphazard promises. I wonder how the ethics questions will play out- that is, whether the Metropolitan questions will fall under the consideration of the biotech companies, the government, the scientific community, the public- as this industry settles into being, into a state resembling stability.

I agree with Daniel Callahan on a good number of issues; for one, that allowing an unchecked individualist ideology to determine the ethical course of biotechnology would likely be an irresponsible 'choice.' By extension, I would also agree that this ideology, which Callahan believes currently dominates the sphere of biotech ethics, "needs a strong competitive voice." Considering myself fully leftist, I'm a bit surprised that I fully agree with the claim that "liberal individualism is poorly equipped to help us.. develop the moral perspectives to deal with the.. complexity" resulting from recent and future advances in biomedical technology. I'm intrigued by Callahan's description of communitarianism: it very much appeals to my anarcho-syndicalist sensibilities. My concern lies in how Callahan's (quite idealistic) framework could be meaningfully implemented in a society as individualistic as ours. It's been my observation that, given the choice to participate or not to participate in a civic capacity, large segments of the population will choose not to participate. I'm talking about relatively simple democratic forms, like voting, attending meetings to discuss local politics. I realize that the phenomenon of civic disinterest (and its myriad causes) is not at all a simple matter, so I won't oversimplify. But as I read over the democratic participation section in "Individual Good and Common Good" (p. 504), I have to wonder: does Callahan really expect that "every member of the community" will want to "have a part in these discussions," even if they are "allowed to speak the language most congenial to their... values," with a topic as thorny, as 'academic' as bioethics? I don't doubt that these communitarianism guidelines could work within the confines of a smaller group- in fact, I imagine such a framework would shine in this context. Sadly, I think that liberal individualism is winning out over other "voices," such as communitarianism, because individualism's competitors are far more nuanced and complex (i.e. require a far higher investment of time, attention and care on the part of the participants) than that to which the American public is accustomed. The American system of representative government seems to me to be the closest large-scale model we have to what Callahan calls communitarianism. And Yankee Democracy doesn't even come close to inspiring the near-universal level of democratic participation that communitarianism would require.

Goddamn it if I don't sound like a stick in the mud. I want to get on board. I like Callahan's ideas and I agree with most of them. Question is, how to grab the pie from the sky and put it on the table?

Zwart's appeal: What, why, and why now?

On first reading Understanding the HGP, I was surprised that a scientist would do the research and write what amounts to a defense of using a decidedly nonscientific means- biographical literature- to convey scientific ideas. It seems possible that Zwart is rebutting a commonly-held grudge extant in his niche of the scientific community. I wonder, are indignant scientists writing essays damning the use biographical literature to convey science-knowledge? Does the substantive opposite of Understanding the HGP exist in some other science journal (or a previous issue of New Genetics)?

Though he dances around it, lurching, sometimes dramatically within the space of a paragraph, between praise and harsh criticism of biography in this context, his thesis becomes clear on p. 358: "(I)n comparison to the official channels and avenues of scholarly publication- and to a much greater extent than other contingent genres- biographies and autobiographies constitute an important complementary source of information for understanding scientific change." The rhetorical tone of the entire piece, with its careful examination and dissection of the criticisms of science biography, lead me to believe that Zwart is appealing to fellow scientists not only to accept biography as an important tool for communicating with the public and across disciplines, but to engage in more such writing.

Why now? Not having read anything more from Zwart than what he's written here, I can only posit guesses as to his motivations. Perhaps he believes that the public still misunderstands the issues, processes, and science behind genetics and genomics; that vital biographies are yet to be written. At any rate, the appeal is timely. This new "techno-scientific field" which caused a shift to a "new paradigm" in the approach of biological research, remains relatively shapeless. There is no shortage of words denoting the novelty and freshness of genomics in Understanding: "new", "emergence", "changing", "transforming", and "transformation" all appear several times as modifiers. The fact that the genomics wunderfirm deCODE Genetics applied for bankruptcy protection last November perfectly illustrates the volatility of the industry.