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Biotechnology

Article · December 2015

DOI: 10.1016/B0-08-043076-7/03147-8

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Preprint:

Hilgartner, S. “Biotechnology.” International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral

Sciences, 2nd Edition. Elsevier, 2015.

The final publication may not precisely match this prepublication version. Please refer to
the published version when quoting or citing this work.

Biotechnology

Keywords:

Bioethics; Biotechnology (and biotechnology industry, and biotechnology

revolution); Commercialization of science; Expertise; Futures; Genetically modified
organisms; Genomics; Governance; Molecular biology; Risk management;
Synthetic biology; Technological revolutions

  1  
Abstract:

This article surveys the rise of biotechnology since the closing decades of the twentieth

century, examining both scientific developments and social and institutional change. As

an area of science and technology with the explicit goal of intervening in the machinery

of life, biotechnology often disrupts traditional ways of distinguishing “nature” from

“culture,” calling into question settled social arrangements. As a result, biotechnology

poses difficult challenges of governance. This article examines the rise of biotechnology

and considers its technological and epistemic dimensions, then turns to its institutional

aspects and problematic position in contemporary politics. The role of risk management

and bioethics in legitimation are discussed.

  2  
Biotechnology

In the closing decades of the twentieth century, biotechnology emerged as a site of rapid

change in science and technology and as an arena of social and institutional

transformation. The development of new techniques for studying, manipulating, and

redesigning living things produced important applications in medicine and agriculture,

and generated massive investment. In the world of research, biotechnology was often at

the forefront of change in scientific institutions and practices. More broadly,

biotechnology—widely perceived as having “revolutionary” implications—inspired both

intense enthusiasm and determined opposition. As an area of science and technology with

the explicit goal of intervening in the machinery of life, biotechnology often disrupts

traditional ways of distinguishing “nature” from “culture,” calling into question settled

social arrangements. The potential for change associated with emerging biotechnologies

thus has presented societies with normative choices about the kinds of futures they seek

to create, sparking controversies about new hopes, risks, subjectivities, and ethical

dilemmas. As a result, biotechnology poses difficult challenges of governance. This

article surveys the rise of biotechnology, examining its technological and epistemic

dimensions, its institutional aspects, its and problematic position in contemporary

politics.

1. The Term Biotechnology

Defining biotechnology poses challenges, for the word is less a tightly defined, technical

term than a loose umbrella category, or even a slogan, that conveys—sometimes

simultaneously—visions of unbounded progress and unregulated tampering with nature.

  3  
Many authors have tried to capture biotechnology within their own well-crafted

definitions, but these attempts cannot neatly contain this expanding network of activities

and increasingly dense connections to diverse social worlds. Although the word has a

long history (Bud, 1993), in most contemporary contexts biotechnology refers to a novel

and growing collection of techniques, grounded in molecular and cell biology, for

analyzing and manipulating the molecular building blocks of life. The term also

designates products, such as pharmaceuticals or genetically modified foods, created using

these techniques. At times, it refers not to products or techniques but to an economic

sector or area of research. Biotechnology acquired these intertwined meanings toward the

end of the 1970s, coming into widespread use in the early 1980s, as molecular biology

was increasingly understood not only as a “science” for learning about nature but also as

a “technology” for altering it.

2. The Biotechnology “Revolution”

One of the ironies of the rise of biotechnology is that a sense of revolutionary potential

energizes both the enthusiasm and the opposition it engenders. Supporters and critics

alike often fit biotechnology into a narrative of radical discontinuity (e.g., Carlson, 2010;

Conway, 1997; Kevles and Hood, 1992; Rifkin, 1983; Kass, 2002). Biotechnology

advocates claim that it will completely transform medicine, spawn entirely new

industries, and supply adequate food to the growing world population. Critics—who warn

of unanticipated consequences and the hazards of altering human identity—also cast the

new biology as a revolutionary force, arguing that genetic engineering is ushering in a

risky new stage in evolution, as nature itself comes under technological control.

  4  
Alongside the notion of revolution, the discourse on biotechnology also features an

opposing frame that stresses continuity with the biological and historical past. Thus,

supporters of biotechnology sometimes downplay its novelty, defining it inclusively (e.g.,

as the harnessing of biological agents to provide goods and services) and portraying it as

merely the latest twist on age-old methods of plant breeding, animal husbandry, and

brewing. Such moves help to make the exotic familiar, to suggest that ancient precedents

justify apparently novel practices, and to undermine the notion of an untouched “natural”

order that must be protected from human intervention. Critics of biotechnology, for their

part, often contend that predictions of unprecedented progress overstate the benefits,

suggesting that biotechnology will perpetuate, rather than eliminate, long-standing

inequalities in agricultural and health care systems.

As these observations suggest, narratives of continuity and discontinuity provide

opposing frames that participants in debates about biotechnology can selectively deploy

to mobilize support for their views. But for social scientists, the relevant question is

whether the concept of a biotechnology revolution has analytic utility. Although some

might be tempted to dismiss this notion as overheated rhetoric or media “hype,”

revolutionary rhetoric and mass media coverage play a constitutive role in shaping

biotechnology (Fortun, 2008; Hilgartner, 2012). Like information technology and

computers, biotechnology seems perpetually to stand at the threshold of the next

qualitative transformation (see Science and Technology, Social Study of: Computers and

Information Technology). Emerging technologies exist not merely in material form, but

also as expected or imagined futures built in part of hopes, fears, and promises that drive

speculation and have effects in the present (Brown et al., 2000; Fortun, 2008; Nelson et

  5  
al., 2008, Rabinow and Dan-Cohen, 2005). Biologists who pause to marvel at the pace of

progress, like ordinary citizens who reflect on the stream of announcements from the

research front, experience biotechnology as an area of ongoing change where old

boundaries are continually broken and the unprecedented rapidly becomes the mundane.

2.1. A New Technological and Epistemic Space

Whether framed as revolutionary change or incremental evolution, there is no doubt that

biotechnology has grown increasingly prominent since the 1970s, inspiring the growth of

an increasingly global, “big biology” (Davies et al., 2013). Biotechnology emerged from

a complex constellation of phenomena, among them the development of increasingly

powerful means for representing and manipulating the molecular building blocks of life.

At the level of infrastructure, the routinization of practices for culturing biological tissues

transformed cells into tools for investigating their own operation (Landecker, 2007).

Beginning in the early 1970s, the development of a cascade of novel techniques—

especially recombinant DNA technology, monoclonal antibodies, in vitro fertilization, the

polymerase chain reaction (PCR), and high-throughput DNA sequencing—dramatically

extended human control over living organisms. Although the arrival of each of these

techniques was widely heralded as “revolutionary,” the growing power of biotechnology

cannot be attributed to any single tool, but stems from the ability to combine and

recombine such tools, creating new assemblages capable of building and taking apart

molecules, rearranging the genetic code of organisms, and reading, analyzing, and

writing the “language” of DNA with an increasingly integrated set of laboratory

techniques and computational tools. No less significantly, such techniques have

  6  
consolidated and accelerated epistemic change in the life sciences, increasing the

centrality of metaphors from information theory and cybernetics (e.g., code, control, and

text) for understanding living things (Kay, 2000; Keller, 1995, 2002). More precisely,

these tools provide practical means that, quite literally, lend substance to these

metaphors, giving them material form and making them into epistemic things embedded

in experimental systems (Rheinberger, 1997) and sociotechnical networks (see

Experiment, in Science and Technology Studies).

The field of molecular biology expanded rapidly after World War II (de Chadarevian,

2002), and by 1970, scientists knew how genes specify protein structures and had found

enzymes that cut, join, and extend DNA molecules. This set the stage for recombinant

DNA technology (rDNA)—the emergence of which is often taken as the starting point

for modern biotechnology. Recombinant DNA techniques enabled scientists for the first

time to insert or delete genes from the genetic code of living things, for example, by

removing a piece of DNA from one organism and splicing it into the DNA of a distantly

related species. The development of these methods generated great excitement and

provoked controversy (discussed below) about the wisdom and safety of genetic

engineering. Beyond opening up a wide range of new research strategies, this technology

allowed scientists to design genetically modified organisms to produce commercial

products. In the late 1970s, researchers began using genetically engineered bacteria as

microscopic manufacturing plants for making valuable proteins, such as human insulin

and human growth hormone.

  7  
In the last two decades of the twentieth century, the power of the biotechnology tool kit

continued to increase. The development of monoclonal antibodies, which permitted

scientists to construct extremely accurate assays for detecting specific proteins, yielded

applications in research and medical diagnostics (Cambrosio and Keating, 1995). New

methods for transferring genes into developing embryos allowed scientists to alter the

genetic code of animals, thus extending genetic engineering from microorganisms to

higher forms of life. Parallel techniques enabled scientists to produce transgenic plants

(Nelson, 2012), and research aimed at improving the genomes of agriculturally important

crops became a major focus of the plant sciences. Molecular biology and biotechnology

also played an increasingly central role in the development of pharmaceuticals, including

vaccines, antibiotics, and drugs used to combat heart disease, cancer, and AIDS.

Tools and practices for representing and analyzing DNA molecules were also rapidly

developed (Fujimura, 1996). Methods for mapping the location of genes grew

increasingly powerful; the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) became important in

research, diagnostics, and forensics (Rabinow, 1996b); and DNA sequencing—a

technique for representing the nucleotide sequences of DNA molecules as written

inscriptions (strings of the letters A, C, G, and T)—rapidly developed. In the 1990s, the

Human Genome Project, along with other concerted mapping and sequencing efforts,

produced an exponentially increasing volume of biomolecular data on a variety of

organisms of medical and agricultural importance (Cook-Deegan, 1994; Gaudillière and

Rheinberger, 2004). New “factory-style” laboratories dedicated to sequencing also

emerged during the human genome project, and in the years since the completion of a

“first draft” of the human sequence was announced in 2001, a new generation of

  8  
sequencing machines spurred a continuing exponential increase in the production of

sequence data (Hutchinson, 2007). These data—along with increasingly automated

means of producing, standardizing, ordering, and analyzing them—constitute the core

resource of genomics and bioinformatics, fields that have further united information

science and biology. In effect, by opening up new computational approaches to biology,

genome data have created a new technological and epistemic “space,” allowing

researchers to perform “experiments” in silico or in a domain linking computational work

to the “wet lab.”

Developments in cellular biology also expanded the reach of biotechnology. In 1997, a

team of Scottish researchers announced that they had cloned a sheep, who they named

“Dolly,” using a technique called Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (SCNT). Put simply,

Dolly was a “copy” of an adult ewe created by transferring the nucleus of one of the

adult’s cells into an enucleated sheep egg and implanting it in another ewe using in vitro

fertilization (IVF). This feat—the first successful cloning of a mammal—suggested that

cloning of human beings could also be achieved, sparking controversy around the world

about the ethics of human cloning. At about the same time, the discovery of embryonic

stem cells (ESCs) suggested a novel strategy for attacking a variety of human diseases.

Because ESCs can differentiate to form a wide range of tissue types, they could

potentially be used to create replacement tissues to restore function to damaged or

diseased organs or systems. Stem cell research inspired great hope and significant

investment, but like SCNT, human ESC research also provoked controversy. In many

countries, the destruction of human embryos to “harvest” stem cells generated determined

opposition, although the cross-national differences were significant (Prainsack, 2006).

  9  
In recent years, biologists and biotechnologists have (often quite self-consciously)

advanced new “paradigms” for research and technology development. One notable

development is the rise of “systems biology,” which seeks to holistically examine the

interactions of systems of biological components, tracking their operation quantitatively

using computational and mathematical techniques (Calvert, 2013). Another is “synthetic

biology”—an effort that seeks to apply engineering principles to make biotechnology into

a true engineering discipline (Campos, 2013; Carlson, 2010, Pottage 2006). Rather than

modifying existing living organisms as biotechnologists presently do, synthetic biologists

imagine creating entirely new biology-based devices and systems. Several strategies for

achieving this have been proposed, including a scheme based on creating standardized

biological “parts” (or “biobricks”) analogous to electronic components; the idea of using

a “minimal genome” as a “chassis” for constructing organisms; and the possibility of

engineering novel nucleic acid chemistries of human design. Synthetic biology has

generated much excitement, but the field is still in its infancy and how and whether it will

mature remains an open question.

2.2. Institutional dimensions

Large infusions of capital, promotional state policies, and novel institutional

arrangements played a significant role in spurring these developments (Thackray, 1998).

By the end of the 1970s, government, industry, and academic elites in both Europe and

the United States saw investment in “high technology”—especially computers and

biotechnology—as the long-term prescription for economic growth. On both sides of the

Atlantic, policymakers sought to spur innovation and speed the translation of basic

  10  
science into marketable products. The result: a significant shift in the political economy

of research that eased the commodification of knowledge (see Intellectual Property,

Concepts of). Governments encouraged universities and corporations to form new kinds

of academic–industry alliances, and the scope of intellectual property protection grew

considerably broader, expanding to encompass, for example, genetically engineered

organisms (Boyle, 1996; Jasanoff, 1995a; Hilgartner, 2009). These developments—along

with increasing globalization of not only the economy but also research and

development—have contributed to the emergence of new forms of economic activity and

what some have termed “biocapital” (Sunder Rajan, 2006; Helmreich, 2009).

In the United States during the 1980s, significant numbers of academic biologists became

entrepreneurs for the first time, seeking to launch new biotechnology companies that

many imagined at the time might soon grow into enormous firms. The most dramatic

institutional innovation was the startup company founded by venture capitalists and

university professors—many of whom kept their academic posts (Kenney, 1986).

Increasingly, biotechnology research took place in spaces that were not neatly lodged in

either an academic or a corporate milieu, but in complex hybrids of university and

industry, public and private, and basic and applied research (see Science and Industry;

Universities and Science and Technology: United States). Some observers warned that

these hybrids would threaten the independence of academic biologists, weakening the

research system and compromising their ability to offer a credible, critical voice in public

decision-making. Debate continues about whether these developments represent a threat

to the moral and intellectual integrity of university science (Mirowski, 2011; Shapin,

  11  
2008), but ultimately these institutional innovations proved irresistible, given competitive

pressures and the scientific and economic opportunities.

Owing to international variation in research systems, the commercialization of

biotechnology followed distinct paths in different nations. In Europe and Japan, the large

multinational corporations (MNCs) that controlled production of pharmaceuticals,

chemicals, and agricultural inputs tended to build biotechnology directly into their in-

house research operations. But in the United States, with its unique pattern of venture

capital financing, a separate “biotechnology industry” composed of freestanding firms

took shape (Kenney, 1998). The first major wave of biotechnology firms appeared

between 1979 in 1981, and during the following two decades, entrepreneurs founded

successive waves of firms, whipping up investor enthusiasm around a series of

“revolutions,” including monoclonal antibodies, gene therapy, genomics, stem cell

research, and synthetic biology.

Even in the United States, however, MNCs—which poured huge sums into genetic

engineering, rational drug design, and genomics—became the dominant players in efforts

to exploit the new biology commercially. Indeed, given the structural connections

between the biotechnology firms and the MNCs, the image of a separate biotechnology

industry is somewhat misleading: Biotechnology startups often derive the bulk of their

revenue from contracts with giant companies; MNCs often acquire successful firms; and

many biotechnology firms are best understood as research shops that hope to sell

intellectual property to large corporations. But if efforts to exploit the new biology are

increasingly the province of both large and small firms, the culture of the biotechnology

  12  
startups that emerged in the United States captured the imagination of science policy

makers elsewhere, some of whom have sought ways to stimulate parallel developments.

More broadly, policy analysts are promoting the goal of stimulating the growth of the

“bioeconomy”—a term defined inclusively to reach beyond health and agriculture to

include the production of fuels, the recycling of materials, and the manufacture of

plastics, paper, and industrial chemicals (OECD, 2009).

3. The Politics of Biotechnology

Since the early 1970s, biotechnology has posed difficult problems of governance,

confronting societies with a stream of potentially controversial issues. The expanding

applications of biotechnology—which moved quickly from being mainly a research tool

into being an important part of medicine and agriculture—significantly increased the

numbers of actors with normative ideas about its proper use. The development of DNA

forensics (Lynch et al., 2008; Hindmarsh and Prainsack, 2010), the advent of genetic tests

that yielded predictive information about the onset of future disease (Parthasarathy, 2007;

Hedgecoe, 2004), and the rise of “biobanks” of samples of people’s DNA (Gottweis and

Petersen, 2008) all raised questions of governance. Biotechnology also got entangled in

the politics of race, as scientific research projects intended to study human diversity

raised persistently troubling questions about how to represent human similarity and

difference (Reardon, 2005; Koenig et al., 2008). In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks

of September 11, 2001 and the anthrax attacks only days later, the military potential of

biotechnology grew into a prominent security concern (Balmer, 2012; Vogel, 2012).

Indeed, as biotechnology grew increasingly entangled in a variety of social institutions, as

  13  
it was integrated into more and more aspects of everyday life, societies throughout the

world confronted a stream of normative questions about how to fit biotechnology into

their ways of living in the world.

Finding legitimate settlements to these controversies sometimes proved difficult. Because

biotechnology often seems to undermine basic categories of social order, such as the

“natural” or the “human,” it tends to pose problems that do not fit neatly into the

cosmologies and routines that guide public action. Democratic societies thus face the

challenge of building new discursive regimes, regulatory mechanisms, and forums for

public discussion that can narrow disputes and achieve legitimacy. In this respect, the

institutionalization of risk management and bioethics have been particularly important.

Although the precise techniques for engineering consent have varied across nations

(Gottweis, 1998; Jasanoff, 2005), states have consistently responded to opposition in

ways that allowed the development of biotechnologies to proceed. Despite a cascade of

visible controversies, states have generally managed to convert volatile mixtures of

concerns into more stable forms. In culturally specific ways, unstable blends of technical

uncertainties, science fiction scenarios, critiques of corporate power, and misgivings

about hubris and slippery slopes, have largely been discursively distilled into categories

amenable to bureaucratic management and expert decision-making (Jasanoff, 2012).

3.1. Risk management

The process of “thinning” multidimensional controversies into manageable technical

problems susceptible to regulatory solutions is well illustrated by what has come to be

known as the recombinant DNA debate (see Risk, Sociology and Politics of). During the

  14  
1960s and early 1970s, scientists and other observers often construed the arrival of

genetic engineering—viewed, once again, through the frame of radical discontinuity—as

a portentous development that raised many troubling choices for society. As researchers

became convinced that molecular techniques would soon make it possible to modify the

genomes of living organisms, a number of prominent scientists warned that developments

in biology could be dangerously misapplied, and they called for broad public discussion

of such possibilities as the genetic engineering of humans. However, soon after

researchers began splicing genes into bacteria and viruses, the focus of discussion shifted

from broad concerns about the long-term implications of genetic engineering to much

narrower and immediate questions about the laboratory hazards of recombinant DNA

(rDNA) research (Wright, 1994). In particular, scientists familiar with the early gene

splicing experiments worried about accidentally creating dangerous microorganisms,

resulting in catastrophic epidemics or disrupting ecosystems. The problem of providing

credible scientific arguments that rDNA research could be safely conducted posed

significant challenges given limited evidence and technical debate about the magnitude of

the hazards, and in 1974 ten prominent biologists published a call for a partial

moratorium on certain rDNA experiments.

The debate about the “moratorium” and the physical hazards of rDNA research threw the

future of genetic engineering into doubt, but it also allowed broader ethical and political

questions to slip into the background (Gottweis, 1998; Wright, 1994). Moreover,

scientific experts soon developed a discursive framework that provided a technical

strategy for controlling the laboratory risks. This strategy, which took shape at a famous

international meeting in Asilomar, California, relied on a system of classification

  15  
(experiments would be grouped according to their expected level of hazard) and a

gradient of controls (e.g., physical barriers, such as negative air pressure, and biological

controls, such as “disarmed” bacterial strains unable to survive outside the laboratory).

On both sides of the Atlantic, the strategy of requiring increasingly stringent containment

for increasingly risky experiments formed the basis for guidelines or regulatory controls,

designed by expert committees, that allowed research to proceed.

Containing the microbes within the laboratory became a means of containing fears and

allowing genetic engineers to pursue the unbounded possibilities they believed to lie

before them. As the 1970s progressed, these controls were progressively relaxed as a

growing number of scientists concluded that the danger of devastating epidemics was

remote. Ultimately, the resolution of the controversy inspired a second-order debate

about whether scientists, policymakers, and publics had responded appropriately or

excessively to the risks of novel organisms. In contemporary debates over biotechnology,

the rDNA debate has acquired an almost mythic status (Hurlbut, 2014): at times, it serves

as a cautionary tale about the dangers of irrational fear of technology; more often, it

provides a commendable example of scientists taking responsibility for the social

implications of their work.

In the 1980s and 1990s, new regulatory challenges emerged as agricultural

biotechnologists sought to move genetically modified organisms (GMOs) from the

laboratory to the field—first on an experimental basis and later in full-scale production

(see Agricultural Sciences and Technology). In this context, risk management shifted

from containment to deliberate release into the environment, a move that engaged new

  16  
sources of expertise, such as ecologists, in risk assessment. Nevertheless, fears grew that

agricultural biotechnology might accidentally produce new superweeds, alter ecosystems,

and expose unsuspecting consumers to the risks of allergic reactions. By the late 1990s,

the efforts of U.S. companies, notably Monsanto, to introduce genetically modified (GM)

crops into Europe were encountering intense opposition from activists warning about the

dangers of “Frankenfoods” and calling for their ban. Framing their arguments in terms of

the consumer’s right to know, opponents of agricultural biotechnology also demanded

that all GM foods be explicitly labeled as such. Soon the technology was embroiled in a

global debate turning not only on issues of safety, narrowly construed, but also on

questions of corporate power in agriculture and the danger that reliance on GM seeds

would trap the poor farmers of the developing world into dependency. Supporters of

agricultural biotechnology contended that GM crops are a green and pro-poor technology,

reducing risks from conventional pesticides and conveying useful traits useful such as

drought resistance or nutritional enhancements.

The reaction to GM foods in different countries over the last two decades is too diverse

for easy generalization. Extensive controversy broke out in Europe and India, and GM-

free movements mobilized in Brazil, South Africa, and elsewhere (Stone, 2010). Jasanoff

(2005) provides an instructive comparison of Europe (especially Germany and the United

Kingdom) with the United States, where agricultural biotechnology provoked relatively

little public reaction. The US Food and Drug Administration was able to “naturalize” GM

foods using a regulatory strategy that defined them as “substantially equivalent” to non-

GM foods, a move that not only allowed GM products to be brought to market but also

forestalled labeling. In the United Kingdom, however, the issue could not be contained

  17  
within the domain of regulatory deliberation. Environmental and consumer groups

actively opposed the introduction of GM crops and foods, leading major supermarket

chains to withdraw GM products (Ibid.), and spurring the government to undertake an

inquiry into the public acceptability of GM, including an unprecedented two-year public

participation exercise known as “GM Nation” in 2001-2002 (Horlick-Jones et al., 2006).

Opposition movements also took hold on the European continent, and in 1999, five

European Union (EU) member states decided to block the introduction of GM products

until a system for identifying and labeling them was put into place. In contrast to the US,

the EU decided that rather than treating GM foods and crops (absent evidence to the

contrary) as equivalent to their “natural” counterparts, it would treat them as a class of

biological entities requiring regulatory action. Within a few years, the EU had put in

place a regulatory framework for labeling GM products and making them “traceable” as

they move through the food system (Lezaun, 2006). The market for GM foods and the

percentage of land used for GM crops remain much smaller in Europe than in the United

States (Stone, 2010).

Observers have often attributed the contrasting reception of GM foods in Europe and the

United States to public ignorance or simple material interests, but careful analysis

suggests that the deeper reasons stem from variations in collective modes of public

knowledge-making and public reasoning—what Jasanoff (2005) calls “civic

epistemologies.” The ongoing debate over GM foods and crops thus suggests that the

ability of risk management techniques to depoliticize conflicts over biotechnology is far

from universal, depending deeply on specific cultural and institutional contexts,

especially at the level of the nation.

  18  
3.2. Bioethics

The policy narratives and practices of risk management offered one means for translating

the unruly politics of biotechnology into governable forms; bioethics offered another—

especially regarding human biotechnology and molecular medicine. The potential of the

new biology to destabilize, redefine, or deliberately alter the identities of individuals,

groups, or “human nature” often generated apprehension or resistance, even as it also

inspired excitement and opened possibilities for constructing new subjectivities

(Rabinow, 1996a; Rose, 2007) (see Human Sciences: History and Sociology; Biomedical

Sciences and Technology: History and Sociology). Encounters with genetic medicine

often cast people into the problematic role of “moral pioneers” (Rapp, 2000). Some

observers worried that predictive genetic testing would threaten privacy and deprive

people of uncertainty about fate; others feared that genetics would reinforce racial

prejudices or produce new stigmatized groups; still others objected to the desacralization

and commodification of human life. Since the late 1990s, the creation of large collections

of human DNA, so-called “biobanks,” inspired concerns about privacy, control, and

governance (e.g., Corrigan and Tuton, 2009). Such worries, which did not neatly fit into

the technical and economistic discourse of risk management, were typically addressed

through the interpretive frameworks and institutions of bioethics.

During the 1970s and 1980s, bioethics emerged as an institutionalized area of inquiry and

technique for decision-making. The bioethics phenomenon, like the growth of risk

management, was by no means confined to biotechnology. In medicine, health care, and

clinical research, bioethics—performed in such diverse sites as academic literatures,

  19  
national commissions, hospital ethics committees, and, most recently, biotechnology

corporations—has grown into a prominent feature of public life (DeVries and Subedi,

1998; Kleinman et al., 1999; Rothman, 1991). The rise of biotechnology contributed to

the rise of bioethics, fueling its growth with a cascade of controversies about genetic

testing, gene therapy, and reproductive technology—matters that increasingly came to be

seen as part of the professional jurisdiction of a new cadre of bioethics experts (see

Science and Technology Studies: Experts and Expertise). Indeed, by the late 1980s, when

the Human Genome Project was proposed, the notion that bioethical analysis could play a

major role in addressing the societal dimensions of the new biology was sufficiently

widespread that national governments flocked to build “ethics” into their programs of

genomics research (Cook-Deegan, 1994).

The peculiar relationship between the domains of bioethics and biotechnology is nicely

illustrated by the politics of governmental programs on the ethical, legal, and social

implications (ELSI) of genomics. (In Europe, these programs tended to avoid the

arguably deterministic word “implications” in favor of the more open term “aspects,” and

hence were known as ELSA programs.) A broad consensus supporting ELSI/ELSA

programs often coexisted with deep disagreement about what these programs should aim

to accomplish. The US ELSI program, for example, was celebrated as an important

innovation in science policy and presented as proof that social concerns would not be

neglected, yet the program was also beset by criticism from many directions. It was

accused of being both hypercritical and unduly promotional of genetic technology; of

taking an overly academic and long-term view and of narrowly focusing on the

immediate; of being too small to address the pace of change and of being a waste of

  20  
valuable research funds. But such debates about the shape of these programs missed the

more pervasive, if subtle, ways that bioethics functions as a quasi-regulatory institution in

contemporary states. Bioethics provided an idiom and institutional space for defining

controversies about human genetics and genomics as ethical issues, better addressed

through moral reflection than mobilization. Thus bioethics commissions often served to

narrow debate, focusing attention on “thin” questions of means rather than “thicker”

debate about ends (Evans, 2002).

To be sure, the ability of bioethics to narrow and contain public debate was incomplete,

as the controversy about embryonic stem cells in the United States nicely illustrates. In

this case, debate over ESC research, tightly connected to religious beliefs about the

sanctity of life and the divisive national controversy over abortion, ended up being fought

in the arena of electoral politics, and the ongoing debate featured attacks on national

bioethics commissions for having “politicized bioethics.” But despite its limitations,

bioethics offered a tool for shoring up the legitimacy of political institutions, suggesting

that states could find rational and secular means for drawing moral boundaries to replace

the apparently natural ones that the biotechnology revolution erased. In this way,

bioethics—like other forms of expert advice (Jasanoff, 1990; Hilgartner, 2000)—has

become an important means not merely for making decisions but also for reordering

societies challenged by rapid technological and social change.

  21  
Cross references

Bioethics: Examples from the Life Sciences; Bioethics: Philosophical Aspects;

Biomedical Sciences and Technology: History and Sociology; Cultural Evolution:

Overview; ELSI Initiative; Ethical Issues in the New Genetics; Genetic Engineering;

Health Care Technology; Human Genome Project; Medicine, History of; Research and

Development in Organizations Technological Innovation

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