HACKING, Ian - Genetics, Biosocial Groups and the Future of Identity

8/3/2019 HACKING, Ian - Genetics, Biosocial Groups and the Future of Identity

1/16

Biosocial is a new word, but its pedi-gree, although brief, is the best. PaulRabinow, the anthropologist of the ge-nome industry, wrote about biosociali-ty in 1992.1 He invented the word part-ly as a joke, to counter the sociobiologythat had been fashionable for some time.

When he wrote, Rabinow was inter-ested in groups and the criteria aroundwhich they form. Of course, humanbeings are biosocial beings: biologicalanimals and social animals. But the factthat manygroups of people can be loose-ly characterized in both biological andsocial ways, and that the bio and thesocial reinforce each other, promptedhis term. This phenomenon is immedi-ately evident: what are families or ex-tended kinship structures if not bioso-cial groups? Currently, the genetic im-perativethe drive to nd biological,but above all genetic, underpinnings

for all things human, in sickness or inhealth, in success or in strifeis fuelingfascination with this concept.

Ddalus Fall 2006 81

Ian Hacking

Genetics, biosocial groups

& the future of identity

Ian Hacking, a Fellow of the American Acad-

emy since 1991, holds the chair of Philosophyand History of Scientic Concepts at the Collge

de France. His most recent books are Mad

Travellers (1998), The Social Construction

of What (1999), and Historical Ontology

(2002). A new edition of The Emergence of

Probability appeared in 2006.

2006 by the American Academy of Arts

& Sciences

1 Paul Rabinow, Articiality and Enlighten-ment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality, inJonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, eds., In-

corporations (New York: Zone Books, 1992); re-printed in Paul Rabinow,Essays on the Anthro-

pology of Reason (Princeton, N.J.: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1996), 91111. Rabinow isan insider-outsider with whom many leadinggures in the biotechnology eld talk freely.They respect his wholly critical approach asgood science in its own right, which means, inpart, inquiry fueled by intense curiosity. Thisworking relationship is truly uncommon in the

burgeoning eld of science studies. The respectis mutual. Rabinow has no doubt that geneti-cists are nding out how it is. Unlike most aca-demics, he works well with the commercial,venture capital side of the industry, and is per-haps more comfortable there than in academ-ic laboratories. See a series of his books fromMaking pcr: A Story of Biotechnology (Chica-go: University of Chicago Press, 1996) to PaulRabinow and Talia Dan-Cohen, A Machine toMake a Future: Biotech Chronicles (Princeton,N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005). He doesnot restrict his work to the United States, forhe is the most challenging informant about as-pects of French biotechnology. Paul Rabinow,

Frenchdna: Trouble in Purgatory (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1999).

He has also had another role, as Americasrst reliable facilitator (a handy enough term)for Michel Foucault, with whom there was thesame mutual respect. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul


2/16

After an initial deterministic enthu-siasm, almost everyone came to realizethat everything is not in our genes, to cite

the important polemic of Richard Le-wontin, Steven Rose, and Leon Kamin.2

One, there are not enough genes; sec-ond, it is the when and where and howof the expression of genes that counts;third, junkdna and other primordialstuff are not as junky as they seemed;fourth, proteins are now where the ac-tion is; and so on. Nevertheless, the bio-

logical, and then the genetic, impera-tives are facts of modern life. And farfrom increasing determinism and limit-ing opportunity, the life sciences arecreating more choices. On the one hand,we have, in a sense, more biologies tochoose from than we anticipated. Onthe other hand, new societies form along

newly recognized (or, at any rate, new-ly asserted) biological or genetic lines,forging new alliances and loyalties. Forg-ing new identities.

Some would say that Rabinow acceptstoo readily the self-image that life tech-nologists would like to project. For ex-

ample, when Lewontin was mountinghis critical onslaught on the polices sim-plistic use ofdnangerprinting, Rabi-now published in 1992, the year he gaveus biosociality, a piece called GaltonsRegret: On Types and Individuals.3 Init, he describes Francis Galton, the ge-nius who, among many other accom-plishments (including the invention of

the silent whistle for police dogs), devel-oped a system to identify criminals usingtheir ngerprints. He adapted his systemfrom the Indian Civil Services, whichwas necessary because imperial adminis-trators found it hard to recognize manyof their subjects denitively. His regretwas that, although a complete set of n-

gerprints does identify a person unique-ly, it says absolutely nothing about thatpersons character.

In some ways, the work of Galtonsrival, Alphonse Bertillon, who inventedthe French system of identication byears, might well have proven more rel-evant for recognizing character traits.That, at any rate, was the speculation

during the heyday of the criminal an-thropology inspired by Cesare Lombro-so. Anyone who has a green card confer-ring resident-alien status in the UnitedStates can check and see that the photothereon conforms to Bertillons demandthat an ear always be shown.

Butdnangerprintinghere perhapsI am carrying Rabinows analysis a steptoo fara method of identication in-timately connecting you with a geneticprole, does indeed show a lot aboutwho you are and who your ancestors

82 Ddalus Fall 2006

Ian Hackingonidentity

Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralismand Hermeneutics, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1983). I single out the secondedition because the interview printed there isone of the most useful places to begin a philo-sophical discussion of Foucaults later ethicalstudies. Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader(New York: Pantheon, 1984). He continuesto explore some of Foucaults leads. Many ofthe essays in his Anthropos Today: Reflectionson Modern Equipment (Princeton, N.J.: Prince-ton University Press, 2003) are at the intersec-tion of Rabinows abilities, on the one hand,to learn from Foucault and, on the other, tograsp what is happening in biotechnology.

There is unlikely to be anyone else, at present,as agile with biotechnology and as adept indiscussing biopower as Paul Rabinow.

2 Richard C. Lewontin, Steven Rose, andLeon Kamin,Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideol-ogy, and Human Nature (New York: Panthe-on, 1984). See also, for example, Richard C.Lewontin,It Aint Necessarily So: The Dreamof the Human Genome and Other Illusions (New

York: New York Review of Books, 2000).

3 In Paul R. Billings, ed., dna on Trial: Genet-ic Identication and Criminal Justice (Plainview,N.Y.: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press,1992); reprinted in Rabinow, Anthropology of

Reason, 112128.


3/16

were. Also where you come from, thatis, the neighborhood in which you live.Galton would have loved it. But not only

Galton: the entire European tradition ofcriminal anthropology has been broughtback to life, although few dare to men-tion it because it is thought to be as dis-reputable as Galtons eugenics.4

Lewontins critique was invaluable.There had been an all too glib enthusi-asm fordna identication followingits initial successes in the United King-

dom. In addition to technical objectionsbased on genetics or American jurispru-dence, an elementary difculty arose atonce. There is the old adage that crimesagainst the person are most often com-mitted by family members or neighbors.Family members share a lot of genetictraits, and neighbors live in neighbor-

hoodswhose members tend to clumpin historical and geographical, that is,ethnic, ways. Thus, the probability ofnding a dnamatch should not be theprobability of nding such a sequencein the worlds population, or even thatof the northeastern United States. Therethe probability may be minute. Rather,the relevant gure is the probability of

having such a match within a few blocksof the crime, where it will most likely bea lot larger. Let alone when the suspectsform an extended family. So the chanceof a false conviction based on the earlydna probability calculations was fargreater than was at rst supposed.

The criticisms made by Lewontin andothers had impact, and in part thanksto changes that resulted, genetic nger-

printing is now considered remarkablyreliable. One little-noticed effect was onthe law-enforcement system. The fbinow has an enormous data bank con-tainingdna proles of certain neigh-borhoods. If you come from a neighbor-hood where crime is common (in fact,as opposed to local folklore), the fbiknows an awful lot about your neigh-

bors genomes and, by statistical impli-cation, perhaps your own. Hence, wecan now assess dna evidence with morerelevant probabilities, or referenceclasses.

The technique applies exactly as wellin ethnically diverse neighborhoods thatbreak into recognizable subgroups. For

example, supposedna

is left on thescene of a crime in a heterogeneous LosAngeles neighborhood, 40 percent ofwhose members are recent immigrantsfrom the Republic of Armenia and 40percent quite recent immigrants fromMexico.dna evidence may indicate thatthe suspect is Armenian. Obviously, wedo not then want to use the reference

class of all inhabitants of the neighbor-hood to compute the probability of arandom match between the evidenceand our suspect. Instead, we want thereference class of Armenian immigrants,who may well be so genetically similarthat reliable identication is very dif-cult. Especially if they all came from thesame neighborhood in the old country.dna criminal identication needs in-

numerable cautionssome technical,some common sense. Lewontin rightlyfeared that poorly analyzed genetic evi-dence would make false convictions alltoo easy. At its worst, almost any mem-ber of an already targeted group couldplausibly be made to t the crime. How-

ever, in principle, if not always in prac-

Ddalus Fall 2006 83

Genetics,biosocial

groups &the future

of identity

4 For A Bibliography for a Course of Crimi-nal Anthropology, or Criminal Sociology, Cir-ca 18934, see Ian Hacking, The Taming ofChance (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1990), 246247. For parallels betweenthat criminal anthropology and its 1990s face-lift, see Ian Hacking, Criminal Behavior, De-generacy and Looping, in David T. Wassermanand R. T. Wachbroit, eds., Genetics and Crimi-nal Behavior (Cambridge: Cambridge Universi-

ty Press, 2001), 141167.


4/16

tice, the new local data banks make thatfar more difcult. And however muchdna has made securing convictions

easier, genetic ngerprinting has alsohelped free a signicant number of indi-viduals previously convicted on inade-quate evidence.

The House on 92nd Street, a wonderfulmovie made in 1944, provides a pointof comparison between the new nger-prints and the old. Made with the fullcooperation of thefbi (apparently be-

fore Hiroshima, although released onlyafter), the movie shows how the fbicaught German spies stealing atomicsecrets.5 In it is a shot of a vast arenawhere young women searched the en-tire bank of ngerprints the fbi pos-sessed in 1944 in order to identify theguilty parties. The lming took place on

the real site, long since torn down. Theroom is auditorium-sized, but the proce-dure is automated, using Hollerith cards,derived in the rst instance from the

Jacquard cards for industrial weavingof long ago and the predecessors for thepunch cards developed by ibm, whichdescends from Holleriths original com-pany.

One sees the force of the metaphordata bank. It is not just a secure placeto store masses of data; the endlessstacks of cards are banks in anothersense of the word. For anyone who hastrouble with gene sequencing and com-puters, this scene is a reliable metaphorfordna-ngerprint searching today.The two chief differences: todays iden-tiers are genes, not the surfaces of n-gers, and the sorting is electrical, notmechanical. And, of course, it takes

place not in a room the size of a hockeyrink but in a little gray box. Police servic-es, in many parts of the world, are just

as proud of their sorting devices todayas the fbi evidently was of its in 1944.And rightly so, despite the occasionalmisjudgments that overreliance onblack-boxed technology can produce.

Rabinows more speculative remarksabout biotechnology, as opposed to hisanthropological, sociological, and his-

torical descriptions of the scienticwork, tend to be prophetic. Thus, al-though Lewontin was absolutely rightto demand stiffer criteria for dna iden-tication, Rabinow was right to foresee,fteen years ago, the increasing role ofgenetics in life and self-conceptions. Ishould at once emphasize that he was

not primarily interested in the use of ge-netics for racial identication, the cur-rent bone of contention. No, he waslooking further into the future when, forexample, risk markers for disease andcauses of death might prompt people toidentify themselves as thatsort, the onesat risk of having Alzheimers, an autisticchild, etc.

A neighborhood is a good introductionto the idea of already existing de factobiosocial identities. Many Armenians,for example, emigrated to a handful oflocations in the United States for all theold-fashioned biosocial reasons: familyties, a network of employment oppor-tunities, language, lifestyles. On a Sun-day morning the parks of an L.A. suburbare full of Armenians, by no means allnotably t, playing soccer. Where thereare serious Angeleno hills and canyons,groups of Armenians of all ages and bothsexes are taking sociable walks, com-plete with sticks that appear to comefrom their former homes. This last ob-servation by itself is enough, from a

sociologists point of view, to set them

84 Ddalus Fall 2006


5 The House on 92nd Street, directed by HenryHathaway, released September 1945. All thefbi agents except Lloyd Nolan are played byfbi personnelin many cases the actual per-

sonnel involved in the historical events.


5/16

apart from almost any other recent im-migrant group. In small clumps on a hillthey do look somewhat alike to the out-

sider. And, to put it bluntly, their His-panic neighbors hate them. Romeo andJuliet had a simple life compared to thehandsome son of the Mexican immi-grant in love with the beautiful daughterof Armenians. Finally, there is the bond-ing narrative that burns in every soul,the Armenian massacre.

The ties that form this biosocial unit

are certainly more social than biological.No one in the group needs to know whatthe fbi data bank holds for this neigh-borhood to identify with each other.They probably would not want to know,for with all the centuries of marauders,pillages, and rapes that run through thehistory of the Caucasus and nearby re-

gions, one would nd a far more distinctphenotype (what these particular Arme-nians look like) than genotype (which isnot so different from that of nearby peo-ples in their former region). Neverthe-less, in the new, quite compact neigh-borhood within the greater Los Angelesarea, the fbi would have no difculty(yetjust wait for Romeo and Juliet to

do their thing) telling an Armeniandnasample apart from a Hispanic one.

As is so often the case with living col-loquial speech, the hood really denotesan important entity, which tends to beboth social and genetic. To say that is tohold up the red flag for accusations ofracism. Good. We need to get the racestuff out in the open quickly, or we maybe overtaken by new versions of race sci-ence put to its most evil uses.

We must rst erase one worthy itemfrom the former dogma of liberal atti-tudes: that all race science is biased bal-derdash, in particular, that the geneticvariation between two randomly chosen

members of one racial group is just as

great as that between two randomly cho-sen members of different races. This wascommonly supported, in politically cor-

rect statements for general audiences, bysaying that humans share 98 percent oftheir genome with pigs, or earthworms,or whatever species is obviously beneathus. So how could genes distinguish Ar-menians from Hispanics, if they canbarely distinguish us from earthworms?We owe the scientic argument to Rich-ard Lewontin, who put it in place over

thirty years ago.6 Editorials to this effectwere still appearing inNature GeneticsandNature as recently as 2001.7

Epidemiological practice has longignored such agreeable cant, certainlysince the early 1990s when racial reg-istries for bone-marrow transplantswere established.8 Lewontins doctrine

was not as sound as it seemed. The trou-ble is that his theoretical argumentassumed that characteristics associatedwith race, either stereotypically or phys-iologically, are statistically independent.They are not. As Hitler liked to pointout, even though few whites have blueeyes and blonde hair, nearly every blue-eyed blonde has whitish skin. A. W. F.

Edwardss 2003 theoretical refutationof Lewontin, attending to correlationsamong traits and genetic markers, isnow widely judged to be correct.9

Ddalus Fall 2006 85

Genetics,biosocial

groups &the future

of identity

6 Richard Lewontin, The Apportionment ofHuman Diversity, Evolutionary Biology 6 (1972):381398.

7 Nature Genetics 24 (2000): 97; Nature Genetics

29 (2001): 239; Nature 409 (2001): 812.

8 Ian Hacking, Why Race Still Matters,D-dalus 134 (1) (Winter 2005): 102116. I shall notrepeat my four-page discussion of race-basedmedicine here, but it is taken for granted inwhat follows.

9 A. W. F. Edwards, Human Genetic Diver-sity: Lewontins Fallacy, BioEssays 25 (2003):

798801. Edwards is a statistical geneticist at


6/16

Edwardss analysis is, for anyone witha modest statistical training, rather di-rect and self-evident, and yet it had to

wait thirty years before anyone thoughtthe matter out in public. I suspect that,since Lewontins conclusions were soobviously correct, no one attended tothe logic of his argument. I do not meanto imply that the issues are simple, onlythat what was so condently asserted in

Nature Genetics a few years ago is obso-lete. The fall 2004 issue of the same jour-

nal was all about race and genetics. Itsings to a tune altogether different fromthe harmonies of three years earlier.

The upshot is that stereotypical fea-tures of race are associated both withancestral geographical origin and, tosome extent, with genetic markers. Onthe one hand there was the experiment

I would categorize it both as acute andcutein which samples of saliva weretaken from people around the world,chosen on an essentially randomizedprotocol for geographical region. Theywere then run through fairly standardcomputer programs designed to sortgroups of objects with lots of character-istics into small groups of distinct class-

es. These programs can take a middencontaining pottery fragments with dif-ferent designs, for example, and sort theshards into a few classes, which archae-ologists conjecture come from distinctepochs. Such a program sorteddnasamples from around the world, unla-beled, into a small number of groups.

It produced ve groups of people, recog-nized as the ve races of nineteenth-cen-tury science, plus one group that did not

t well with any preconceptions.10

Theexperiment does not strictly prove any-thing, but it is a signicant anecdote.

On the other hand, interbreedingamong populations of different geo-graphical origins has been common inmany parts of the world for a very longtime. In such regions, skin color and therest furnish little indication of the pro-

portion of ones inheritance that oneowes to different geographical regions.This has been most decisively estab-lished for Brazil.11 Genetic markers can-not distinguish between affluent urbanwhite-skinned business people in SoPaolo, who deem themselves descen-dants of the Portuguese, and rural dark-

skinned peasants, who think their fore-bears came from Africa.We have yet to have a good study of a

real old-time melting pot like the SilkRoad from China to the West. Thosewho are more impressed by looking thanby analysis can make a guess of what toexpect from the extraordinarily power-ful paintings of nomads attributed to

Muhammad of the Black Pen (Muham-mad Siyah Qualam) in the thirteenthcentury, common era.12

At present, plenty of anecdotal evi-dence points to the same effect aboutAmericans. It is symptomatic of the oldrace science that Caucasian is still the

86 Ddalus Fall 2006


10 Noah A. Rosenberg et al., Genetic Struc-ture of Human Populations, Science 298(2002): 29812985.

11 Srgio D. J. Pena et al., Color and GenomicAncestry in Brazilians, Proceedings of the Na-tional Academy of Sciences 100 (2003): 177182.

12 See, for example, the catalog of the RoyalAcademy Exhibition, Turks: A Journey of a Thou-

sand Years 6001600 (2005).

Cambridge University. For fear that his tes-timony be taken as a priori suspect, I shouldmention that perhaps the most vigorous life-long proponent of the irrelevance of racefor evaluating human beings is Luca Cavalli-Sforza. Edwards was for some years his col-laborator and developed much of the statisti-cal machinery on which his early population

genetics depended.


7/16

name used in the United States for whitepeople, who not long ago thought a sin-gle drop of alien blood could pollute

them, when in fact people from the Cau-casus are most likely a very mixed ge-netic bag, just as they are on the old SilkRoad. Call that idiocy, or call that an in-advertent stroke of ironic prescience, asyou please.

The partial alignment of genetic mark-ers and stereotypical racial identicationrightly leaves African Americans in a

quandary. Although the fact is not muchpublicized, quite a lot of scientic workon race-based medicine is conductedunder essentially Afro-American aus-pices. At a quite different level, for peo-ple whom slavery, exploitation, and con-tempt left without family history, dnaidentication furnishes a probable butunreliable way of tracking their ori-gins.13 In these and other ways, somegenetics is welcome. However, the fearthat all thisdna stuff will be put to rac-ist purposes, including high-tech crimi-nal proling, is justied. But there isno hiding. And it is quite possible thatwhite liberals want to hide more thanblack Americans do.

There is a whole forest of practicalneeds for genetic identication. Forexample, if a person in another conti-

nent can show the existence of kin inNorth America, immigration there isfacilitated and in some cases guaranteed.So a host of companies is offering genet-ic services.14

Most of the nineteenth-century Ca-nadian treaties with Indians conferredrights to the Indians at the same time asthey took their territory. In present law,

descendants of treaty persons have, un-der various complex conditions, rightsand privileges different from those ofother citizens. Similar laws exist in theUnited States. Hence, companies deter-mining the extent of a persons aborigi-nal ancestry also get a lot of business.

I am taking a rather benign view of theuse of genetics to trace identities. I hopethe dangers are evident. It will be tempt-ing to turn optional sources of evidenceinto obligatory types of proof. Anotherreasonable fear is that a lust for technol-ogy, and an admiration for false preci-sion, will make genetics override com-munity, among not only technocratsbut also people in general. For example,

it might become easy to reject childrenwho grow up in a community but forwhatever reason are genetic outliers.15

Ddalus Fall 2006 87

Genetics,biosocial

groups &the future

of identity

13 Blacks Pin Hope on dna to Fill SlaverysGap in Family Trees,New York Times, July 29,2005, A1. You can get something about yourancestors quite cheaply. Since this is a highlycompetitive market, prices will keep on falling,and any costs I might write today will soonbe out-of-date. For an idea, try Google: for ex-ample,Family Treedna, from Family Tree Ge-netics Ltd., located in Houston, Texas, displays

what it asserts is a competitive chart of com-parisons with two major rivals, Relative Ge-netics (U.S.) and the Oxford Ancestors (U.K.).ftdna labs scientists are world-renownedgeneticists and discoverers of original markersthat have been included in other lab tests. Itis difcult for a layperson to gure out exactlywhat any such organization is selling, or evenwho the world-renowned paid collaboratorsare. Caveat emptor, and consult a knowledgeable

person before you spend a cent.

14 Thus, Genelex says it has facilities availablein seventy-two countries from Argentina toVietnam. Unlike the rm cited in the previousnote, it does offer proles of its managementand consultants. It asserts, Genelex tests are

100 times more discriminating than the indus-try standard. Typical positive test results exceed99.99%. The longer you look at that assertionthe more ways you can read it. Did I say buyerbeware?

15 Jon Elster drew my attention to debate in-volving legislation under consideration in Ver-mont. Kimberly Tallbear, dna, Blood andRacializing the Tribe, WicazosaReview 18

(2003): 81107.


8/16

If the genome begins to override culture,then all citizens must rise up and insistthat social bonds are what make us peo-

ple. But we must also understand thatknowledge of genetic identities willforge social ones, creating new commu-nities of shared recognition based onpartial science. That is not intrinsicallybad, but it is still a phenomenon that canbe grossly abused.

And whatever use individuals want tomake of genealogy kits (yes, the com-

mercial labs send you a kit to collectsome of yourdna for analysis), epi-demiologists will relentlessly collectnew data. Today, if you go to a NationalHealth Service clinic in Great Britain,you will be asked to complete a ques-tionnaire in which you state what youthink are your ethnic and, above all, geo-graphical roots (you can have as many asyou want). Some well-educated liberalBrits I know mock these forms or opposethem. While their fear of the all-power-ful nanny-state that knows too muchabout you is legitimate, they also ridiculethese forms out of the uninformed beliefthat ethnic and geographical self-iden-tication is, among other things, worth-

less. Not so: it is a useful, very cheapguide to aspects of your genome.

Yes, self-identication is imperfectinformation. But it is cheap. It is com-parable to the bmi, the Body Mass In-dex, which the current obesity panichas made a household phrase. Adiposi-ty, the ratio of body fat to body mass, isthe important health indicator, but it is

fairly expensive to measure by any cur-rent techniqueand thus comparable toa personal dna readout. But the bmi isvery cheap: stand on a scale, stand undera device that measures height, press twobuttons on a calculator (or use one of theinnumerable online bmi calculators),and there you have your bmi. The bmi

originated in epidemiology in the 1960s

but was not so named until 1972.16 Oneof its rst classic uses was in a nationalNorwegian survey to detect seriously

underweight people and note the corre-lation with tuberculosis.17 A nationalstudy of adiposity would have been moreinformative and would have cost abouta million times more. The U.K. Nation-al Health Service survey of ethnic self-identication is much the same: a largedata set using cheap information ratherthan a minute data set using expensive

information.When it becomes clearer what one

ought to be looking for in patient genet-ic data, and when obtaining that databecomes very cheap, epidemiologistswill collect it. All British genes will goon le, unless a public outcry arises fargreater than what has occurred so far.This is already being done piecemeal inquite a few parts of the world, includingQuebec and the United Kingdom, butthe most systematic and most publicizedprogram is in Iceland, where a venturecapital company, DeCode, and the Ice-landic government have an agreementto matchdna, genealogies (which aremore extensive in Iceland than any-

where else in the world), and health

88 Ddalus Fall 2006


16 Ancel Keys et al., Indices of RelativeWeight and Obesity, Journal of Chronic Dis-eases 25 (1972): 329343. The ratio, namelymetric weight over height squared, is mucholder. But it was used not for medicine butfor anthropology (anthropometry), and in per-haps the rst instance for studying the rateof growth in height and weight in children

a project that goes back to Buffon.

17 Erik Bielke, Variation in Height andWeight in the Norwegian Population, British

Journal of Preventive Medicine 25 (1971): 192202. Much of the early bmi literature frominternational sources was published in Britishnhs-oriented medical journals. For the classicfull study, see H. Th. Waaler, Height, Weightand Mortality: The Norwegian Experience,

Acta Medica Scandinavica Supplement 679 (1984).


9/16

records, both present and historical.The company then essentially leases theinformation to multinational pharma-

ceutical companies, who use it to pros-pect for links between genetic markersand disease.

Signicant opposition to the Icelandiccontract arose from a variety of civil lib-erty and green spokespeople in Iceland.Some physicians objected: they werewary that their privileged access to pa-tient information and control was being

sold out from under their noses. Interna-tional activists also protested. The Ice-landic public, however, appeared rela-tively at peace with the deal. As alwaysin such matters, local contingencies areoften more effective in swaying publicopinion than at rst meets the eye. Inthis case, a large number of well-educat-ed Icelanders reside in all parts of the in-dustrial world. Many would like to gohome if they could get a good job. Partof the deal with DeCode was that labora-tory and computer work would be donein Iceland, thereby repatriating part ofIcelands greatest natural resource, herhighly skilled citizens.

In prosperous parts of the world we al-

ready take for granted a great many spe-cialized genetic searches. At the time ofwriting, New York State screens fetusesfor forty-four different types of diseaserisk. It is often argued that full geneticscreening is a public-health obligation,and sometimes that it is a right of thecitizens covered by the system. We havenot been clear about the resulting moral

problems, though. Public discussionstend to emphasize how screening makespossible essential early medical servicesfor newborns and infants. It plays downthe extent to which screening promptsabortions. It is not only across-the-boardopponents of abortion who worry whena test leads to killing the fetus. A vocal

number of disability activists, who are in

fact handicapped, also protest: I wouldrather be me than unborn.

So we have plenty of things to worry

about. I myself am more than perturbedabout pharmaceutical companies mar-keting risk-oriented medications basedon genetic treasure hunts. It is also trou-bling that preventive pharmacogeneticswill be developed mostly for new drugs,whose patent writs will continue for agood time into the future. Preventivepharmacogenetics? I did not invent the

noun. In the future, we will have theability to screen patients for bad sideeffects of a drug, by picking out theirgenetic markers. Such tailoring, as ittends to be called, will become standardfor future drugs, but not for the largeand useful pharmacopoeia of older med-icines, many of which, like all potentchemicals, have awful unintended ef-fects on some people.

In this section I have only been labor-ing the obvious: the intersection of med-ical, social, personal, and prot-makinginterests ensures that the avalanche ofgenetic information available about in-dividuals and populations has only be-gun. We need informed debate from

many points of view. Though we mustalso give blanket opposition its properweight in the spectrum of dissent, ittends to stay of its nature long behindthe cusp of what is actually and irre-versibly happening.

The genetic imperative is the drive tond genetic markers in humans. It com-mands out of its own intrinsic strength,but it ts in neatly with our risk society.Ulrich Beck was the rst to use this termto describe the industrialized world.18

Ddalus Fall 2006 89

Genetics,biosocial

groups &the future

of identity

18 Ulrich Beck,Risikogesellschaft: Auf dem Wegin eine andere Moderne (Frankfurt: Surhkamp,1986), translated as Risk Society: Towards a New

Modernity (New York: Sage, 1992).


10/16

Beck was initially concerned with risksthat we ourselves create by innovation,and its military and industrial applica-

tions, but the concept now applies alsoto risks that are not primarily of our ownmaking, such as the risk of inherited dis-ease or disability.

Disease genetics tends to track risks,not causes. There have certainly beenunequivocal triumphs in discoveringthe latter, such as Jrme Lejeunes 1959identication of the association between

an extra chromosome 21 and Downssyndrome.19 Almost every fetus withan extra chromosome 21 will developinto a child with Downs syndrome, ifit is allowed to live. This is so probablethat it is unnatural to speak of risk here.The fetus is bound to develop in thatway because of a programming malfunc-tionor so we imagine in our computer-driven era.

There we have a true success story ofthe genetic imperative in medicine. Thegenetic defect is now quite often iden-tied with the syndrome, and this hasbeen made part of French semantics,

where the syndrome is usually just calledtrisomie. (This has turned out to be a lessthan exact label, for triplings of certain

other chromosomes produce other birthdefects or disabilities, so one must nowsay trisomie vingt-et-un.) There are othersuccess stories, for which the teams thatdiscovered them are justly honored. Butthe medical-research community is nowfully convinced that most further corre-lations between genetic informationand manifest illness or disability will be

multifactorial. Genetic markers willnot be causes but risk factors.

Though risk implies danger, and dan-ger implies harm, not every geneticsearch is a search for harm. Some chil-dren may come from a gene pool thatenables them to play the violin at agefour and to compose symphonies at ten.We search for genetic markers of theseexceptional desirable abilities as well.The possibility of genes that protectagainst diseases is also spurring genetichunts. For example, Alzheimers diseaseshows up rarely or not at all among cer-tain American Indian communities.Something genetic may confer immuni-

ty to, or delay, the advance of senility. Ifso, nding this protection factor will beof great importance.

A certain ambivalence, or ambiguity,also surrounds the genetic imperative.Consider the well-publicized searchesfor a gay gene (typically in men) and analcoholism gene. Those who hope foran alcoholism gene believe that the dis-covery will prove beyond all doubt thatalcoholism is a disease or, at any rate, aninnate disability. Those who hope for agay gene believe that such a discoverywill prove beyond all doubt that homo-sexuality is not a disease or disability.Such contradictory pairings remind usthat we are still in the adolescent phase

of thinking about biosociality.

90 Ddalus Fall 2006


19 Langdon Down contributed immensely bymaking the rst identication of a separate de-

velopmental disability, which he called Mongo-lian idiocy. We blush now at the name, whichwas abandoned in 1960, but most of us haveforgotten that his work was part of an explic-itly racialist program to classify mental andphysiological defects as throwbacks to otherraces. J. L. H. Down, Observations on an Eth-nic Classication of Idiots, London Hospital

Reports, 1866; reprinted inJournal of Mental Sci-ence 13 (1867): 121123. Mongolism became

a standard diagnosis in the English-speakingworld, thanks to W. W. Ireland, On Idiocy and

Imbecility (London: Churchill, 1877), but wasnot picked up in continental Europe until theturn of the century. But the vigilant CesareLombroso included it in his atavistic anthro-pology as early as 1873, speaking of what awk-wardly translates as mongolian atavism ofthe cretinoid anomaly. C. Lombroso, Sullamicrocephalia e sul cretinismo, Rivista Clinica

di Bologna, July 1873, fasc. 7.


11/16

After taking these ambiguities intoaccount, though, we still cannot ignorethis central phenomenon: the genetic im-

perative nds its natural home in the risk soci-ety. Even a relatively abstract search, thegenome project, was funded because justidentifying genes was going to help lo-cate risk factors for disease or disability.The dream was eventually to eliminatethe markers and thus remove that sourceof risk. But instead of genetic medicinewe got risk factors. We shall undoubted-

ly continue to be bombarded with hypeabout discovering the Alzheimers geneor the schizophrenia genewith the im-plication that this gene causes this dis-ease or that diseasebut we should ex-pect mostly indicators of risk.

Though cases where genes can predictthe occurrence of a disease with virtualcertainty, like trisomy 21, are rare, theprobabilities can nevertheless be great,as in the early-onsetforms of diseasessuch as breast cancer, colonorectal can-cer, or Alzheimers. Indeed, early-onsetforms seem to show most clearly a di-rect causal connection between geneticmarkers and the appearance of the dis-ease at a denite stage in the bodys ag-

ing process. This may give us real hopein the case of schizophrenia. One formof schizophrenia, rst labeled dementiapraecox, is triggered specically by ma-turity, surfacing mostly in males aroundage seventeen or eighteen. Early-onsetdementia, or so it was rst described.

Scientists are devoting an immenseamount of research to nding genetic

antecedents of two other disorders:Alzheimers disease and autism. Whoknows how all these diseases are entan-gled? Alzheimers is a type of dementiaproduced by aging; one kind of schizo-phrenia is early-onset dementia; andautism was rst identied as a kind ofinfantile schizophrenia (the noun au-

tism was originally the name of a symp-

tom of adult schizophrenics). Maybethose early guesses will have a geneticresurrection. Certainly autistic children

and late-adolescent-onset schizophren-ics are mostly male, suggesting a sex-linked locus for any genetic carrier.

Yet, in spite of all these tempting con-nections, what we should expect to seeis not a geneforany of these disordersbut many genes on numerous sites thatincrease the probability of the disorderappearing at some point. Some of these

sites may contribute to several disorders,while each disorder may require in addi-tion its own unique sites. Or maybe thegenetic conjectures just will not pan out.In any case, we anticipate not determin-ism but risk factors, or worse, multifac-torial risk. But for simplicitys sake, Illrefer to the gene or genes that heightenones chances of getting a particular dis-orderwhether single or multipleas arisk factor.

A set of people with a risk factor is abiological, not social, group. But peopleat risk for the same disease will clumptogether for mutual support, joint advo-cacy, and, in many cases, activism. The

emergence of these advocacy groups willbe one of the most important topics forany history of medicine in late twenti-eth-century America.

Most advocacy groups in existencetoday are for people who are afflictedwith a disease or disability, or have fami-ly members or friends who suffer fromit. These groups often have names likeFriends of Schizophrenia. They are,of course, biosocial, that is, societiesformed around a biological condition.And many are effective. Today, autismis on the front burner thanks to the in-tense advocacy of groups going back tothe 1960s on behalf of children with de-velopmental difculties. Parents, under-

standably, make the ercest activists,

Ddalus Fall 2006 91

Genetics,biosocial

groups &the futureof identity


12/16

but they were greatly aided by the factthat President Kennedy had a sister withspecial needs. We owe the ubiquity of

special-needs services and programs inAmerican schools to that concatenationof events. Until now, however, thesegroups have had little or no dealingswith genetics, except to urge, and occa-sionally contribute nancially to, thesearch for the genetic origins of theirdiseases. Now we step into the future.We will increasingly be able to identify

families that are genetically at risk forvarious disorders. The advocacy groupswill then consist not of those who are illbut of those who are at risk of becomingill.

Such groups bring something rathernew to the discussion of identity, a con-cept which Mediterranean, and then Eu-ropean, philosophers have debated foras long as they have waxed philosophi-cal. Built into their conception of identi-ty was the idea that ones essential fea-tures, not accidental characteristics,should constitute ones identity. Thosewords essential and accidental reekof high metaphysics. The metaphysics

has gone underground, at least amongEnglish-language secular philosophers,ever since John Locke trashed essencesover three centuries ago. Locke gaveaccounts of identity that are splendidlyfree of any waffle about essences. Butthose who wish to talk identities ignorethe surreptitious idea of essence at theirperil. And that is where genetic markers

make a decisive difference.Because no matter how much intel-

lectuals, both humanists and scientists,may inveigh against it, people can hard-ly avoid thinking of their genetic inheri-tance as part of what constitutes them,as part of who they are, as their essence.But now comes a curious turn. We all

carry an enormous mix of inheritance,

and the greater the extent to which apersons recent forebears came fromgeographically disparate parts of the

globe, the greater the possibilities forpicking out and identifying with this orthat distinct strand.

Up until now this has been possibleonly for those whose physiognomy issufciently ambiguous. Life experiencesexploiting ambiguity have been turnedinto art by novelists, most recently byPhilip Roth in The Human Stain. A boy in

a black family, who had rather olive skin,chose to identify as Jewish, and therebyhangs the tale. That is a pregenetic talebut it emphatically revolves around onerecent fruit of biotechnology. Biotechand biopharm are going to be integralto many future novels that are true-to-life in the prosperous parts of the world.Some mentions will be so banal that noone will notice. In this case, the septua-genarian hero is disgraced when he fallsin love with a woman in her thirties whoworks as a janitor. He chooses productsfrom the biopharmaceutical industry torejuvenate himself, to be a younger manthan his undrugged body teaches. P-zers Viagra turns a once-essential prop-

erty, the natural limitations of age, intowhat scholastic philosophers would havecalled an accident.

The novelist Philip Roth and the soci-ologist Erving Goffman share the idea oftheater as a metaphor for chosen identi-ties. Drama is more generous than socie-ty. Roth seems to imply at the end of thebook that his protagonist can reject any

of the identities he has chosen or thathave been thrust upon him. He becomestruly free in a sense that the existential-ists of half a century ago would havewarmed to. I suspect Goffman, a childof that time, who knew Sartres workquite well, would reply that you cannotexist without a roster of acted identities,

or else you are taken for mad. And mad-

92 Ddalus Fall 2006



13/16

ness itself is not a role that can be playedany old how. In every generation arequite rm rules about how you should

behave when you are crazy.

Soon we shall have novels about peo-ple who send in their saliva to a gene-testing company and learn that theirancestry is more tinctured than theythoughtor more pure than they feared.What will be the real-life effect on theself-consciousness of individuals, of

how they think of themselves, of whothey take themselves to be? In the nearfuture it is as likely to be denial as any-thing else. The parable of Thomas Jef-fersons daughter speaks for itself: onlythose who want to listen to their geneswill do so.

Perhaps one of the rst public demon-strations will be political. Imagine a verywhite-looking Brazilian capitalist turnedpolitician. He wishes to declare himselfa man of the people. He sends off his spitand back comes the desired answer: heis more African than Portuguese, witha convenient dollop of Amerindianthrown in. His party blazons these factsacross the nation. The opposition re-

peats to no effect that this hardly distin-guishes him from anyone else in Brazil,that he is nothing but a playboy fromSo Paulo whose grandparents weresmart enough to become very rich.

We are experiencing and will contin-ue to experience another feature of thisphenomenon. A common objection tothe most stringent kind of identity poli-tics is that every human being has manyidentities. Identity politics was partic-ularly urged on minorities wishing toobtain their due and not only repudiatebut also overcome past oppression. Afriend of mine, dedicated to a numberof struggles, furnishes a poignant exam-

ple of being a multiple minority. Yes,

she is black and a woman. More impor-tantly, she is a Haitian, born and educat-ed in Montreal. She was a minority even

among Haitian Montralais, for she hadreceived an excellent education at abourgeois school and did not speakCreole at home. Then she was a franco-phone working in anglophone Toronto.Among Toronto Caribbeans, she had ahard time as a Haitian by a populationthat traces its roots mostly from Jamai-ca and Trinidad. Every single minority

status demanded struggle, with allies onone front often not understanding heractions on another.

So much is a familiar story. It alsohappens that my friend was afflicted,at about age thirty, by a very nasty, lit-tle understood, and almost certainlyinherited aging disorder, prevalent on-ly among Haitians. It causes very rapiddeterioration of the muscles, and not agreat deal is known about it. And we arenot likely to learn more about it for thesimple reason that no one is willing tospend any money on a rare ailment thatafflicts a small and mostly poor popu-lation. (That could change: New York,Paris, and Montreal have many well-to-

do Haitian emigrs; Canada now has aHaitian-Canadian Governor-General.)Here we have a rather startling exampleof what may prove to be a new geneticidentity, being at risk genetically for thisdisorder. My friend could decide that thepressing battle for her today is not theprevious battles, for which she had manyallies, but advocacy for those at risk for

this disease.My example may gain a specious plau-

sibility from the fact that the diseaseappears to affect a subset of an alreadyidentiable group, namely people ofHaitian descent. But it is merely a dra-matic way to illustrate the formationof new biosocial identities around risk

factors, where those who have the fac-

Ddalus Fall 2006 93

Genetics,biosocial



14/16

tor are not markedly different in anyother way. This is not an individual af-fair: those at risk often create organiza-

tions. And while their initial motivationmight be advocacy or support, increas-ingly we shall have making up peoplewith a vengeance. That is, new kindsof people will come into being, peoplecharacterized by a certain risk factor,who band together to create a socialgroup that evolves its own collectivecharacteristics.

Thus far we have considered biologyas given. It is not. By now we take forgranted the biotechnology of organtransplants. The ways in which we cometo regard our body parts as interchange-able is producing a curious reversal ofmuch modern wisdom: body and mindare separating into their Cartesian habi-tats.20 In the old days we used only totattoo, pierce, and bind our body parts.These have been turned into new artforms, witness Orlan in Paris and theAustralian performance artist Stelarc.They both use a lot of biotechnology,and their thoughts border on science.Sterlac, who favors extra ears, has lec-

tured the surgeons at the Radcliffe Hos-pital in Oxford. The fate of people whowant fewer appendages also seems gro-tesque. Yet real subcultures of individu-als who are unhappy with their legs orother body parts exist.21 There are more

biosocial groups on earth, Horatio, thanare dreamt of in your philosophy.

Sex is an aspect of biology about

which there are various kinds of dis-content. Likewise, gender. Transsexualshave completed or are undergoing sex-change chemistry and surgery; trans-gendered people adopt the lifestyle ofthe opposite sex without major use ofchemicals or surgery. While stories ofsuccessful sex-change operations arewell known, many misfortunes unfor-

tunately go unpublicized. But thesemisfortunes are one of the reasons thattransgendered people are becomingmore common and transsexuals lessprominent. There are many variationson these two themes, of which transhu-manism is one of the more remarkable.

Last year, I agreed to give a talk for anadult-education series run by a good uni-versity department. Its main customersare alert retired people. The format wasmonthly discussions on the topic of theperson. My title was People and Cy-borgs. When I arrived, the organizerswere astonished to see a far larger audi-ence than usual. Many of the newcomerswere not in their seventies but in their

thirtieswell-dressed, courteous, but,well, different. The man whose job wasto keep the event running smoothly hap-pened to be a gay friend. I thought hemight know who the newcomers were.No idea, he said quietly, but perhapsthey are from the liberal community.

No time for explanation. I began byquoting Francis Fukuyama. He was one

of ten intellectuals whomForeign Policy

94 Ddalus Fall 2006


20 Ian Hacking, The Cartesian Vision Ful-

lled: Analogue Bodies and Digital Minds,Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 30 (2005): 153166; Ian Hacking, Our Neo-Cartesian Bodiesin Parts, Critical Inquiry, forthcoming.

21 Carl Elliott introduced amputism to the gen-eral reader in Amputees by Choice, in BetterThan Well: American Medicine Meets the American

Dream (New York: Norton, 2003). For the in-house description of the need to be amputated,

see Gregg M. Furth and Robert Smith,Apotem-

nophilia: Information, Questions, Answers andRecommendations about Self-Demand Amputation(New York: 1st Books, 2000). Furth is a NewYork Jungian analyst who does play therapyfor terminally ill children. Smith is a Scottishsurgeon who has done some self-demand am-

putations.


15/16

had asked which current idea would bemost harmful to the world as we knowit. He imaginatively answered, Trans-

humanism.

22

He was referring to theidea that the human race should use allavailable technology to improve itself,an idea that has sparked a viable move-ment institutionalized in many organi-zations around the world. Fukuyamawas his usual prescient self in pickingsomething that few soothsayers wouldhave noticed. Why is it so dangerous?

Fukuyama answered in the truest, andbest, conservative way. He gave Burk-ian reasons that one associates with vonHayek, Popper, or Oakeshot (or Fuku-yama): dont make big changes; if youmust change, change slowly and be sureyou know what you are doing.

After quoting Fukuyama, I then askedthe people in the room, What doyouthink is the most dangerous idea aroundtoday? I received the expected answersfrom people my age: genetically modi-ed food and so forth. Then a youngwoman said very quietly, The idea thatwe should not evolve. I would have saidshe was an impeccably groomed womanof about thirty, of Chinese ancestry, her

accent standard Ontario well-educated.I ought to have been prepared, for I hadgiven a more highbrow talk with a simi-lar theme in Montreal a few weeks earli-er. There, a young black man asked mevery strong direct questions in standardeducated French. I was later told he wasan ofcer in the local transhumanist so-ciety.

As the discussion proceeded with vari-ous members of the audience, the pen-ny dropped more slowly than it shouldhave. Half the population in this audi-ence already knew all about transhu-manism. Cyborg had been my unwit-

ting bait. Moreover, a fair number ofthem had chosen their identitiesinsome cases, perhaps only for the day.

I, the bland permissive liberal, becamemore and more uncomfortable. I real-ized how much I depend on knowing towhom I am speaking. I had no reason tothink that the respondent was female,thirty, or Chinese. Yet, I wanted to knowwho she wasand the same for a num-ber of others.

But they were rejecting that question.

Refusing to choose a society or a biology,they were denying in every gesture thevery concept of a biosocial identity.

Ddalus Fall 2006 95

Genetics,biosocial


22 Transhumanism,Foreign Policy 144 (Sep-temberOctober 2004): 4243.


16/16

This article has been cited by:

1. Olga Solomon. 2010. Sense and the Senses: Anthropology and the Study of Autism.Annual Review of Anthropology 39:1, 241-259.[CrossRef]

2. Bethan Evans, Rachel Colls. 2009. Measuring Fatness, Governing Bodies: The Spatialities of the Body Mass Index (BMI) inAnti-Obesity Politics.Antipode41:5, 1051-1083. [CrossRef]

3. Jeremy Freese, Sara Shostak. 2009. Genetics and Social Inquiry.Annual Review of Sociology35:1, 107-128. [CrossRef]

4. Aviad E. Raz. 2009. Eugenic utopias/dystopias, reprogenetics, and community genetics.Sociology of Health & Illness31:4, 602-616.[CrossRef]

5. Gsli Plsson. 2009. Biosocial Relations of Production. Comparative Studies in Society and History51:02, 288. [CrossRef]
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0010417509000139http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9566.2009.01160.xhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-070308-120040http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2009.00706.xhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.012809.105012

Documents

HACKING, Ian - Genetics, Biosocial Groups and the Future of Identity