Too long, too many late nights ...

Hello out there in Blog-land.

It has been a long time since I opened this blog and, well, I've been busy and to be honest ... I forgot I had this blog!

My profile is still current and I'm about to add some new endeavours to the slightly crowded schedule.
I've signed up to do my PhD at Macquarie University in Sydney and it's on a fairly pithy subject. I'm going to post the proposal I submitted to see if the baited hook garners any nibbles.

Hopefully I might be able to begin to access this more regularly ... we'll see.

Research Proposal: Louis (Lajos) Hamers

This PhD project will set out to elaborate on and interrogate the complex nexus between scientific knowledge, personal and state sovereignty, and global market forces. By engaging with issues surrounding gene patenting and certainty versus knowledge in scientific discourse, this thesis will also examine the material consequences these issues have on citizens of the Third World, in particular on citizens of Papua New Guinea and the Pacific islands. With the pace of advancement in genomics and the ‘life’ sciences outstripping the ethical and cultural responses to it, this dissertation project takes on a gravitas born out of the immediacy of the issues.

In developing this thesis proposal I have accessed material from relevant journals and online sources (Genomics, Social Studies of Science & ‘genomegateway’), literature (Brave New World), print media (New Internationalist) and theorists of the calibre of J. Bronowski, Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway and Peter Singer. To complete this project I will continue to access the aforementioned material, including popular media coverage, as well as seeking to include a program of interviews and private communications with key actors from the included case studies.

From Gregor Mendel (the monk who set the foundations of modern genetics and life sciences in the mid nineteenth century), through James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins (the 1962 Nobel Prize winners for their description of the structure of DNA) to the Human Genome Project, knowledge about the foundations of organic being is becoming ever more focused. We are told that genetics can accurately predict our predisposition as to whether we will become an astronaut, axe murderer or an alcoholic. This genetic code is also promoted as a global panacea for everything from acne and obesity to birth defects and cancer. However, in entwining itself in the matrix of global capitalism, genetic knowledge is packaged to sell an idea of certainty to the world. And selling certainty is a lucrative business for the ‘life’ industries:

"Technology and resources generated by the Human Genome
Project (HGP) and other genomics research are already having a
major impact on research across the life sciences. The potential for commercial development of genomics research presents … industry with a wealth of opportunities" (HGP Website,2005).

The new field of potential to be mined in this context is the human body. The ‘ore’ being plundered is the gene and its curious code. The scientific and commercial value of this ‘ore’ is as much due to its discursive formation as it is to its chemical structure.

The nexus between the work of scientists, market forces, and their positivist project, emphasises “critical shortfalls in medical ethics, human rights provisions and intergovernmental protocols with substantial economic and political implications” (Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI) Communiqué, online, 1996). The late 1990s provides a case study on point. When the U.S. government agency, the National Institutes of Health, applied for the patent over a blood sample taken from the Hagahai people in Papua New Guinea, a new map was being drawn, charting the exercise of Western power over citizens of the third world: new technology combined with old power matrixes to re-assert a continuous, yet evolving, colonial relationship. Although the patent application was eventually withdrawn, there have been subsequent applications over Human cell lines that have included people from the Solomon Islands as well as other ethnic and Indigenous peoples from around the globe (RAFI Communiqué, online, 1996).

Papua New Guinea, already hamstrung by virtue of its status in the global matrix, continues to struggle to exercise its sovereign legitimacy. Albert Maori Kiki (1968) best described the struggle of Papua New Guinean development in the title of his book, Ten Thousand Years in a Lifetime. Consider then the complex situation of the Hagahai people. Their “first contact with the ‘outside’ world” came as recently as 1984 (Mead 1997, p.26) and their position in the maelstrom of modernity left them vulnerable to exploitation. This metaphorical ‘Blackbirding’, as relevant and reprehensible as the kidnapping of Kanakans for their labour in the Queensland cane fields, is being propelled by rapid advancement in genomics. Yet, sovereign states such as Papua New Guinea are struggling to keep up with the ethical and cultural implications of this technology.

The main objective of this dissertation will be to interrogate the discursive formations coalescing around genetic patenting projects, and other related projects in the biosciences as well as mapping out the complex mix of scientific knowledge, personal and state sovereignty and market forces. Also, where certainty has become the representation of knowledge, how this calls into being what Aldous Huxley describes as a “scientific caste system”. Huxley offered up this view of science as “caste system” in the 1946 introduction to Brave New World. It is a view that still has currency.

"Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always on the
brink of the known, we always feel forward for what is to be hoped.
Every judgment stands on the edge of error, and is personal"
(J. Bronowski, The Ascent of Man, 1973).

Jacob Bronowski’s quote asks us to be aware that science, and indeed knowledge in general, is more about exploration and conversation than certainty. In the closing scenes of the “Knowledge or Certainty” episode of the Ascent of Man (1973) television series Bronowski wades into a pond where the ashes of the Holocaust victims from Auschwitz (including some of his family) were flushed. In the final frames he bends down and scoops up the sludge from the pond and exhorts, “we have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power.”

This, in part, exemplifies the significance of this proposed thesis: to question and elucidate on this mendacious and haughty ‘itch’. As genomics advancements continue apace the innovative nature of this subject matter insists that the conversation begins so that the citizens, the living people being affected by the material manifestation of this exercise of power are called back to the centre of the conversation.


Bibliography
Bronowski, J, 1973 The Ascent of Man BBC, London.

The Human Genome Program of the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science website accessed at:
http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/home.shtml
September/October, 2005.

Huxley, A, 1932 Brave New World Granada, London.

Mead, A T P, 1997 “Resisting The Gene Raiders”, New Internationalist. No. 293 (August) pp. 26 – 27.

The National Human Genome Research Institute Website (as part of the National Institutes of Health) accessed at: http://www.genome.gov/
September/October 2005.

Nobel Prize (Online) 2005 Website with information on Nobel Prize winners available at: http://Nobelprize.org/

Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI), 1996 “New Questions About Management and Exchange of Human Tissues at NIH: Indigenous Person’s Cells Patented”, RAFI Communiqué March/April available at: http://www.cptech.org/ip/rafi.html

Reardon, J, 2001 “The Human Genome Diversity Project: A Case Study In Coproduction”, Social Studies of Science. Vol. 31, No. 3 (June),
357 – 388. Accessed at http://www.jstor.org/ Fri September 2, 2005.