diane ludin on Sat, 19 May 2001 19:25:43 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> Diversity.com/Population.gov - Eugene Thacker |
Diversity.com/Population.gov by Eugene Thacker [maldoror@eden.rutgers.edu] A Tsunami of Data When, in the early 1990s, the U.S. government-funded Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) drafted plans for a genetic database of some 4,000 to 8,000 distinct ethnic populations, it was met with a great deal of controversy and criticism. The stakes were raised even more when it was discovered that the HGDP had proposals for the patenting of the cell lines from several members of indigenous populations, all without those members or communities informed consent. Due to the interventions by such groups as the Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI), the HGDP was forced to drop three of its patents. In 1996 it provided a testimony to the U.S. National Research Council and has since drafted a document of "Model Ethical Protocols" for research, which emphasizes informed consent and cultural-ethical negotiation. Since that time, however, the HGDP has been conspicuously silent (it is now based at Stanford University, as the Morris Institute for Population Studies), and, despite the flurry of news items and press releases relating to the various genome mapping endeavors around the world --both government and corporate sponsored--there has been relatively no news or updates on the progress of the HGDP's original plans. Much of this curious disappearing act has to do, certainly, with the bioethical conundrums in which the HGDP has been involved, as well as with the combination of vocal critics such as RAFI, and the HGDP's having been marked by the media and dubbed by its critics as "the vampire project." However, while the HGDP as an organization may have slipped from science headlines, the issues and problems associated with it have not. Another, parallel development within biotech and genetics has emerged, which has more or less taken up the "diversity problem" which the HGDP had dealt with in the 1990s: bioinformatics. Bioinformatics involves the use of computer and networking technologies in the organization of updated, networked, and interactive genomic databases being used by research institutions, the biotech industry, medical genetics, and the pharmaceutical industry. Bioinformatics signals an important development in the increasing computerization of "wet" biotech research, creating an abstract level where bioinformatics can form relationships between bioscientific approaches to diversity and the fluctuations of the biotech economy. A driving economic force is finance capital, bolstered from within by a wide range of "future promises" from biotech research (software-based gene discovery, data mining, genetic drugs, and so on). The emphasis we are witnessing now in "digital capitalism," to use Dan Schiller's term, is an intersection of economic systems with information technology. As Michael Dawson and John Bellamy Foster show, this trend leads to an emphasis on a "total marketing strategy" that is highly diversified: consumer profiling, individualized marketing, "narrowcasting," "push-media" and so on. Such trends are transforming biotech research as well. More often than not, the future of a research field within biotech can flourish or perish depending on the tides of stock values. In turn, those stock values are directly tied to the proclaimed successes or failures of clinical trials or research results. Most of the stock value of the biotech industry is an example of what Catherine Waldby calls "biovalue": either being able to produce valuable research results that can be transformed into products (such as genetic-based drugs or therapies), or the ability to take research and mobilize it within a product development pipeline (mostly within the domain of the pharmaceutical industry). These trends are worth pointing out, because they draw our attention to the ways in which race, economics, and genomics are mediated by information technologies. Genomics--the technologically-assisted study of the total DNA, or genome, of organisms--currently commands a significant part of the biotech industry's attention. In economic as well as scientific terms, genomics has, for some years, promised to become the foundation upon which the possibility of a future medical genetics and pharmacogenomics would be based. As a way of providing a backdrop for Diane Ludin's project, "Harvesting the Net," what I would like to do here is to outline some of the linkages between biotech as an increasingly corporate-managed field, and the emphasis within genomics programs on diversification. Such research programs, which highlight types of "genetic difference," demonstrate the extent to which culture and biology are often con-fused, as well as the extent to which both ethnicity and race are compelled to accommodate the structures of informatics. [continued:] http://www.walkerart.org/gallery9/ludin/ # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net