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Technoprogressive? BioConservative? Huh?
Quick overview of biopolitical points of view


whats new at ieet
Tech Pace Fast, Opposition Uncertain: IEET Readers

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Compassion

What Would You Say?


comments

Dale McCarty on 'Nanotechnology and Cancer Treatment' (Mar 19, 2010)

S on 'No More Libertarians' (Mar 19, 2010)

Tony Bateson on 'Autism And Vaccines: Why People Still Believe The Hype' (Mar 19, 2010)

bensmyson on 'Autism And Vaccines: Why People Still Believe The Hype' (Mar 19, 2010)

RAnn on 'Autism And Vaccines: Why People Still Believe The Hype' (Mar 19, 2010)







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Human Enhancement Technologies
and Human Rights


May 26-28, 2006

Stanford University Law School, Stanford, California

Schedule - Speakers - Download program
Download the poster


Sponsored by: Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences, Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies

Co-Sponsors: Stanford Program in Ethics in Society, GeneForum, ExtraLife

Ravi Glasser-Vora

Department of Critical & Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, Australia


Ravi Glasser-Vora is a PhD candidate in the Department of Critical & Cultural Studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. His research is concerned with the impact of an ethics of informed consent on health technologies and medical practice. He has previously presented papers on circumcision & the anti-communitarianism of a neonatal right to bodily integrity and Foucault’s archaeology of medical perception & the birth of informed consent.

Informed Consent: the break between eugenics and techniques of human enhancement

After World War Two and through the second half of the 20th century, primarily in response to the grand projects and fantasies of biological eugenics, free informed consent has come to be regarded as a necessary condition for the ethical and legal practice of biological research on human subjects and the use of medical and enhancement technologies. Legal precedents and policies in many countries have established the default concept of consent as the basic right of the patient or research participant to be provided with all relevant information about the risks and likelihoods of benefits by the doctor or researcher. Informed consent acted as a provisional moratorium on biological eugenics because eugenics sought to refine and effect human biology in ways that were beyond individual consent.

This paper investigates the continuities and breaks between eugenics and contemporary techniques of human enhancement. In both public discourse and academic work such debates often centre on whether it is legitimate to write off eugenics as a pseudoscience, while contemporary genetic technologies and study can be preserved as legitimate based on their ability to empirically see and test human inheritance. By examining the historical role of individual rights in determining the interventions of the human biological sciences, this paper, instead, moves the debate to the social organisation of human enhancement technologies. It argues that precisely where individual informed consent becomes insufficient to authorise the effects of contemporary enhancement and treatment technologies, new kinds of sociality are developing around the proliferating categories of biomedical classification that both reiterate and challenge the old models of eugenic hygiene.

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