Wrestling with Social and Behavioral Genomics: Risks, Potential Benefits, and Ethical Responsibility.

In this consensus report by a diverse group of academics who conduct and/or are concerned about social and behavioral genomics (SBG) research, the authors recount the often-ugly history of scientific attempts to understand the genetic contributions to human behaviors and social outcomes. They then describe what the current science-including genomewide association studies and polygenic indexes-can and cannot tell us, as well as its risks and potential benefits. They conclude with a discussion of responsible behavior in the context of SBG research. SBG research that compares individuals within a group according to a "sensitive" phenotype requires extra attention to responsible conduct and to responsible communication about the research and its findings. SBG research (1) on sensitive phenotypes that (2) compares two or more groups defined by (a) race, (b) ethnicity, or (c) genetic ancestry (where genetic ancestry could easily be misunderstood as race or ethnicity) requires a compelling justification to be conducted, funded, or published. All authors agree that this justification at least requires a convincing argument that a study's design could yield scientifically valid results; some authors would additionally require the study to have a socially favorable risk-benefit profile.

Hidden Concepts in the History and Philosophy of Origins-of-Life Studies: a Workshop Report.

In this review, we describe some of the central philosophical issues facing origins-of-life research and provide a targeted history of the developments that have led to the multidisciplinary field of origins-of-life studies. We outline these issues and developments to guide researchers and students from all fields. With respect to philosophy, we provide brief summaries of debates with respect to (1) definitions (or theories) of life, what life is and how research should be conducted in the absence of an accepted theory of life, (2) the distinctions between synthetic, historical, and universal projects in origins-of-life studies, issues with strategies for inferring the origins of life, such as (3) the nature of the first living entities (the "bottom up" approach) and (4) how to infer the nature of the last universal common ancestor (the "top down" approach), and (5) the status of origins of life as a science. Each of these debates influences the others. Although there are clusters of researchers that agree on some answers to these issues, each of these debates is still open. With respect to history, we outline several independent paths that have led to some of the approaches now prevalent in origins-of-life studies. These include one path from early views of life through the scientific revolutions brought about by Linnaeus (von Linn.), Wöhler, Miller, and others. In this approach, new theories, tools, and evidence guide new thoughts about the nature of life and its origin. We also describe another family of paths motivated by a" circularity" approach to life, which is guided by such thinkers as Maturana & Varela, Gánti, Rosen, and others. These views echo ideas developed by Kant and Aristotle, though they do so using modern science in ways that produce exciting avenues of investigation. By exploring the history of these ideas, we can see how many of the issues that currently interest us have been guided by the contexts in which the ideas were developed. The disciplinary backgrounds of each of these scholars has influenced the questions they sought to answer, the experiments they envisioned, and the kinds of data they collected. We conclude by encouraging scientists and scholars in the humanities and social sciences to explore ways in which they can interact to provide a deeper understanding of the conceptual assumptions, structure, and history of origins-of-life research. This may be useful to help frame future research agendas and bring awareness to the multifaceted issues facing this challenging scientific question.

When your sources talk back: toward a multimodal approach to scientific biography.

Interviewing offers the biographer unique opportunities for gathering data. I offer three examples. The emphatic bacterial geneticist Norton Zinder confronted me with an interpretation of Barbara McClintock's science that was as surprising as it proved to be robust. The relaxed setting of the human geneticist Walter Nance's rural summer home contributed to an unusually improvisational oral history that produced insights into his experimental and thinking style. And "embedding" myself with the biochemical geneticist Charles Scriver in his home, workplace, and city enabled me to experience the social networks that drive the practical events of his career, which in turn helped me explain the theoretical basis of his science. Face-to-face interaction and multisensory experience will shape each biographer's experience uniquely. Recent developments in sensory physiology suggest that the experience of integrating sense data encourages different patterns of observation and reflection. It is reasonable, then, to think that biography based on face-to-face interviews will, for a given author, have a different character than one based entirely on documents. I reflect on how interviewing shapes my own writing and I encourage the reader to do the same.

The prisoner as model organism: malaria research at Stateville Penitentiary.

In a military-sponsored research project begun during the Second World War, inmates of the Stateville Penitentiary in Illinois were infected with malaria and treated with experimental drugs that sometimes had vicious side effects. They were made into reservoirs for the disease and they provided a food supply for the mosquito cultures. They acted as secretaries and technicians, recording data on one another, administering malarious mosquito bites and experimental drugs to one another, and helping decide who was admitted to the project and who became eligible for early parole as a result of his participation. Thus, the prisoners were not simply research subjects; they were deeply constitutive of the research project. Because a prisoner's time on the project was counted as part of his sentence, and because serving on the project could shorten one's sentence, the project must be seen as simultaneously serving the functions of research and punishment. Michel Foucault wrote about such 'mixed mechanisms' in his Discipline and punish. His shining example of such a 'transparent' and subtle style of punishment was the panopticon, Jeremy Bentham's architectural invention of prison cellblocks arrayed around a central guard tower. Stateville prison was designed on Bentham's model; Foucault featured it in his own discussion. This paper, then, explores the power relations in this highly idiosyncratic experimental system, in which the various roles of model organism, reagent, and technician are all occupied by sentient beings who move among them fluidly. This, I argue, created an environment in the Stateville hospital wing more panoptic than that in the cellblocks. Research and punishment were completely interpenetrating, and mutually reinforcing.

"Polyhybrid heterogeneous bastards": promoting medical genetics in America in the 1930s and 1940s.

I examine three American researchers in the 1930s and 1940s who populate the no-man's-land of medical genetics, between the heyday of "mainline" eugenics and the medical turn in human genetics in the 1950s. In scientists' narratives, William Allan, Madge Macklin, and Laurence Snyder appear as pioneers of medical genetics and genetic education. Allan was a country doctor with an interest in heredity. Snyder, a Harvard-trained geneticist, entered medical genetics through population-genetic studies of human blood groups. Macklin came from a background in academic medicine. Allan, Snyder, and Macklin believed in a genetic approach to medicine well before genetics offered clinical benefits. Although hereditary diseases had begun to overtake infectious diseases as causes of death and illness, formal genetics offered medicine little more than a few explanatory principles. These researchers made their case by a) listing mostly hopeful potential applications of genetics to disease; b) blurring the distinction between genetics and heredity; and c) engaging in preventive genetic medicine, that is, eugenics. Examining their careers reveals some of the texture of eugenic thought in American medicine as well as the continuities between the early eugenic phase of human genetics and the professional medical genetics that today's practitioners take as the origin of their field.