Jenny Reardon

Your DNA Is Our History

During the nineteenth century, the American School of Anthropology enfolded Native peoples into their histories, claiming knowledge about and artifacts of these cultures as their rightful inheritance and property. Drawing both on the Genographic Project and the recent struggles between Arizona State University and the Havasupai Tribe over the use of Havasupai DNA, in this essay we describe how similar enfoldments continue today—despite most contemporary human scientists’ explicit rejection of hierarchical ideas of race. We seek to bring greater clarity and visibility to these constitutive links between whiteness, property, and the human sciences in order that the fields of biological anthropology and population genetics might work to move toward their stated commitments to antiracism (a goal, we argue, that the fields’ antiracialism impedes). Specifically, we reflect on how these links can inform extralegal strategies to address tensions between U.S. and other indigenous peoples and genome scientists and their facilitators (ethicists, lawyers, and policy makers). We conclude by suggesting changes to scientific education and professional standards that might improve relations between indigenous peoples and those who study them, and we introduce mechanisms for networking between indigenous peoples, scholars, and policy makers concerned with expanding indigenous governance of science and technology.

Indigenous body parts, mutating temporalities, and the half-lives of postcolonial technoscience

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/anti-science, 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 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.

Democratic Mis-haps: The Problem of Democratization in a Time of Biopolitics

Following the stringent critiques of organizers of the Human Genome Diversity Project for excluding people from the initiatives early planning, subsequent administrators of high-profile efforts to study human genetic variation, such as the International HapMap Project, have made great efforts to stress the importance of including the people who are to be the objects of study in research design and regulation. Such efforts to ‘democratize’ genomics would appear to represent a positive development. However, in practice they have satisfied few as they fail to recognize the most basic lesson of the Human Genome Diversity Project debates: genomics raises questions not just about the inclusion of people, but about their very constitution. Positing concrete, stable subjects in society, current efforts to ‘democratize’ genomics fail to recognize that entangled in the fundamental questions about nature posed by this emergent form of technoscience are fundamental questions about the order and constitution of societies. The creation of sustainable and desirable forms of governance require us to come to terms with challenges posed to liberal democratic practices and values, such as inclusion, in an age defined partially by this mutual dis/ordering of nature and society.

On the Emergence of Science and Justice

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.

“Anti-colonial Genomic Practice?” Learning from the Genographic Project and the Chacmool Conference

I want to commend the organizers of the Chacmool Conference panel. All too often attempts to discuss the broader social and cultural dimensions of genetic studies of ancient human migrations devolve into simplistic celebrations or condemnations. It is heartening to find here an example of a conference session that managed to avoid these dangerous poles, and to grapple instead with the hard task of discerning the issues raised and not raised by genomic studies of human migrations and history. I would like to devote my commentary to exploring what might be learned from the discussions at Chacmool.

Bermuda 2.0 : reflections from Santa Cruz

Abstract In February 1996, the genome community met in Bermuda to formulate principles for circulating genomic data. Although it is now 20 years since the Bermuda Principles were formulated, they continue to play a central role in shaping genomic and data-sharing practices. However, since 1996, “openness” has become an increasingly complex issue. This commentary seeks to articulate three core challenges data-sharing faces today.