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.

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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.