The Shifting Perimeters: Social and Ethical Implications of Human Genomics Research
National Institute of Advanced Studies
Bangalore, India
Representing emergent global assemblages of science-techno-capital power, research on the human genome has made quick alliances with market networks, flexible capital, and global research. Despite the growth of genomic research and its presence in a wide array of possible uses, the ethical, social and legal implications of human genomics have largely been reduced to a footnote. Human Genome research and its allied science and technical engagements stand to be read at multiple levels: as new information which has implications for a range of disciplines; as new medical knowledge that can be deployed against a range of diseases; as the prototype for new organizational structures in conducting science and technology research; as holding the mastercode to the possibilities of remaking the physiological constitution of humans; as commercialized knowledge in which humans can exercise their choice and options to redefine the physical and social body; and as a body of knowledge that has the potential to alter the perimeters between science and society and the very constitution of a range of disciplines.
In seeking articulations over these issues and concerns, this seminar will be a preliminary conversation to bring together understandings and interpretations related to several questions:
- What are the potentialities of the body of knowledge of human genomics? What significance does it have for the disciplines of medicine, neurobiology, psychiatry, sociology, anthropology, political science, public administration, jurisprudence, and history?
- What regimes (legal, ethical, political) are required to manage the linkage of human genomics research to its market-based, commercial, and profit-oriented use in a wide variety of fields?
- What are the potential advantages and disadvantages that countries, such as India, face in the conduct, dissemination and use of human genomic research?
- What national and international regimes (legal and ethical) are required to ensure that knowledge and information from human genomic research is used as a public good and, therefore, what new transnational legal structures are required to ensure this?
- What are the implications in the use of human genomic research in the fields of a range of new medical knowledge (psychiatry, psychology, physiology etc) and practices (such as personalized medicine; profiling; anticipating diseases etc)?
- What ethical and legal concerns need to be borne in mind even as these gain wide usage?
- What are the larger universal concerns relating to the possibilities of using human genomic research to alter the physiologies of humans and hence what larger ethical and philosophical issues can be raised about the very constitution and understandings of the “˜human”™?
The conference is envisaged as a preliminary conversation on these and other related issues.
Speakers will include IEET Fellow Linda Glenn, with a presentation on Human Genome Research + Converging Technologies = The Singularity (Explorations of the Evolution of Humanity)
Link
IEET Blog