Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Saturday, August 14, 2010

UC Berkeley Pressured to Walk Back Campus Gattacazation Efforts

The University of California, Berkeley -- where I have been a lecturer for fifteen years in the Department of Rhetoric -- has cancelled its plan to provide elaborate individualized genetic screening to all incoming students as part of its "On the Same Page" collective welcome program.

Although researchers will still sample some students' genetic material gathered under informed consent -- and there are still important concerns about this state of affairs -- the data will now be analyzed only in the aggregate and results will not be provided to students. Under the terms of the original plans, incoming students would be provided with individual genetic profiles resulting from these screens. The California Department of Public Health determined that such tests were clearly medical in nature and thus required a certified laboratory, for which the University, typically enough, chose not to pay.

Concerns were raised, naturally enough, about both the privacy of these young incoming first-year and transfer students as well as the great potential to mis-use the information made available by this exercise. Also troubling was the very idea of exploiting a collective welcoming ritual for many thousands of nervous incoming students in an overwhelming new environment, to create peer pressure inducing young people to participate in the program while at once cynically acclimating them to the worrisome scene of being genetically screened by corporate entities in the first place. Further, one has to question the ethics of hyping direct-to-consumer screening products that so regularly exploit consumer ignorance about the current state of our scientific knowledge or the utility of such tests or that systematically over-emphasize the role of genes in the causation of diseases that have significant behavioral and environmental components. Needless to say, these are just some among many other issues brought into play here.

A host of organizations, from the Center for Genetics and Society, and the Council for Responsible Genetics, together with the Alliance for Humane Biotechnology, Consumer Watchdog , Generations Ahead, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, World Privacy Forum,educated, agitated, and organized public representatives and the general public about these issues.

The superlative futurologists are all currently undergoing the lengthy techno-immortalization process through which their brains will be uploaded into cyberspatial heaven under the watchful care of the coming Robot God and in consequence few could be bothered to participate in this effort, even though the early stages of techno-immortalization appear to involve, for the most part, prolonged bouts of handwaving and navel-gazing.

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