Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
led to enormous changes in the production of food and fiber.) The prac-
tical yield of genetic research and technology in its human applications
has been more modest, more technical, and far more specialized than
had been hoped and feared a generation earlier.
Second, twenty-five years of discussion and debate has helped put
to rest the more flamboyant fears and monstrous metaphors that
greeted the new genetic “alchemy.” This interdisciplinary dialogue and
commentary explained the comparatively modest results achieved by
genomic technology by pointing to the indirect, limited, complex, and
synergistic roles genes play in determining phenotypic traits, including
those associated with so-called genetic diseases. Commentators argued
that genetic technology offered just another, albeit more precise, tech-
nology for altering biological traits in plants and animals.
By the 1990s, scholars had thoroughly criticized the assumptions—
and the underlying metaphors—that encouraged the anxieties and expec-
tations commonplace twenty years earlier. These commentators explicitly
attacked the idea that genetic technology differed in kind from other
medical interventions. For example, in 1993, the Task Force on Genetic
Information and Insurance coined the term “genetic exceptionalism,” as
its chair Thomas Murray has written, “to mean roughly the claim that
genetic information is sufficiently different from other kinds of health-
related information that it deserves special protection or other excep-
tional measures.” The task force found arguments for this claim
unconvincing and “concluded that genetic information did not differ
substantially from other kinds of health-related information.”
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Broad-
ening this critique, Glenn McGee has asserted that “in no small part,
genetic exceptionalism has also licensed hyperbole about 'holy grails' and
'unlocking the key to life,' language that is not only misleading but also
damaging to the understanding.”
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The exaggerated myths and fears surrounding genetic technology
were analyzed under a slightly different rubric in an influential topic by
Dorothy Nelkin and M. S. Lindee,
The DNA Mystique.
These authors
showed how images and narratives of the gene in popular culture
reflect and convey a message they called “genetic essentialism,” which
attributes all that is important about people—their basic traits,
their moral potential, their general behavior—to the action of their
genomes.
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