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The Genetic Body
Published in Roger Cooter, John Pickstone, Medicine in the Twentieth Century, 2020
Anxiety about the consequences of inapt reductionism underlies many of these specific concerns. Sophisticated arguments against untrammeled genetic reductionism have been made by both geneticists and non-geneticists. But a number of commentators suggest that in recent biomedical discourse the genetic script is regarded as the sole basis for building bodies or guiding behavior. Lippman has launched a focused attack on this geneticization of medicine, the process in which “differences between individuals are reduced to their DNA codes.”36 From this perspective, maps of the human genome “objectify the body and make the genome the focus of medical attention, rather than the person.”37 The resultant ‘genetic body’ is described in similar terms by Gilbert who writes: We are what our genes tell us we are. This is a body full of potentials. It is who we are and who we might have been. This is the body where the centre of identity is within the nucleus of every somatic cell. It is the body sought by human genome project.”38
The Road to Gattaca 1
Published in Tina Stevens, Stuart Newman, Biotech Juggernaut, 2019
Questions such as these are either wholly ignored or skillfully side-stepped by organizers of meetings convened to consider the social ramifications of genetically manipulating human embryos. And yet, answers to these questions are the dots that need connecting if Gattaca is to be avoided. Why do bioscientists, bioentrepreneurs, and mainstream bioethicists turn away from their examination? How, instead, do they describe the reasons for engaging in activities that virtually ensure arrival at Gattaca? The road to that destination is demarcated by two tracks of bioentrepreneurial behavior. The first is the promotion of a search for cures as the driver of biotech research and development, thereby masking other forces such as commercial incentives and professional advancement. The second is failing either to recognize or accept the fallacy of genetic reductionism.
Small Animal Imaging and Therapy
Published in George C. Kagadis, Nancy L. Ford, Dimitrios N. Karnabatidis, George K. Loudos, Handbook of Small Animal Imaging, 2018
The paradigm shift toward combinatorial chemistry and the availability of high throughput screening approaches resulted in target-based drug and imaging probe development that affect a single target. This implies that a disease and its progression is dependent on a single protein expression product, which is in clear contrast to the approaches using physiology as an end point that can be affected by multiple targets. For new drug or imaging agent development, this could represent an oversimplification leading to a genetic reductionism and inability to develop optimal animal models to simulate a clinical situation. For example, this oversimplification can reduce a disease to a single genetic abnormality modeled with transgenic animals but it may not represent a clinical multifactorial disease. As a result, fully appropriate animal models for many human diseases are not yet available which makes a translation of target efficacy to disease efficacy less certain. Recent recommendation for development of drug and molecular imaging agents is to combine a rational target-based approach with strong physiology and disease focus (Sams-Dodd 2005).
Reasons to Genome Edit and Metaphysical Essentialism about Human Identity
Published in The American Journal of Bioethics, 2022
Tomasz Żuradzki, Vilius Dranseika
Material-origin essentialism, broadly construed, is a rather vague thesis. There is a lot of leeway in how material origins are to be identified. For example, it may assume that it is necessary for the individual to have their actual parents, or to have the exact genetic make-up they actually have, or to originate in exactly the physical matter they actually originate in. All interpretations have their problems (Cooper 2015). The first is vague since the term “parents” may have different meanings (e.g., in the case of surrogacy), and the progress in reproductive technologies makes this term even more ambiguous. Of course, in one sense, the term “parents” may refer to people who supplied genetic material, which in turn, can be understood either as an information carrier or as an actual physical material. In this first interpretation, genetic material is just a form of instruction that can be recorded on different physical bases; in the second, it is reduced to the identity of physical particles that make up gametes. Both of these options have serious problems: the first leads to genetic reductionism, and the second implies many absurd consequences (e.g., someone’s essence may depend on what one’s father had eaten before conceiving). Moreover, some bioethicists suggest that “radical genetic interventions” may create a different child and hence cannot harm or benefit the particular child (Heyd 2021). This amounts to a rejection of the version of the material-origin essentialism that traces the material origins back to the gametes (for other criticism, see: Janssen-Lauret 2021).
Certainties and Uncertainties in Genetic Information: Good Ethics Starts with Good Data
Published in The American Journal of Bioethics, 2022
Montserrat Esquerda, David Lorenzo, Francesc Torralba
Sabatello and Juengst (2019) describe three different kind of “isms” in genetics: “genetic essentialism, concerning the belief that our identity and personal traits are ‘hard wired’ by our genome and that they are intrinsically defined and can be predicted by our genetic makeup; genetic determinism, suggesting that genes alone cause complex human behaviors and that ‘what happens for genetic reasons is involuntary’; and genetic reductionism, which presumes that human nature and health can be reduced to a ‘nothing but genes’ description and equates biological explanations with genetic ones.”