Abstract
The primary vehicle that carries human genetics at the present time is referred to habitually as the “Human Genome Project.” Much attention has been given to the question of whether or not the HGP is “Big Science,” the form thought to be most characteristic of technoscientific projects in the postwar era. This essay may be thought of as an attempt to map the possible effects of shifting our analytic focus from the spatial to the temporal, to see if “Big Science” might be more productively thought of as “Fast Science.”
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Notes and References
W.T. Lhamon, Jr., Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s (Washington, DC Smithsonian Institution Press,1990).
Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams. The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond (New York Grove Weindenfeld, 1992 [1985]), p. 7.
Far from condoning these particular experiments or promoting a general valorization of the practice of spying, I am deploying the metaphor here for two effects: first, to recall another set of meanings of “to spy”, troped less around secrecy and espionage and more around notions of “observing closely” and “keeping watch”; and second, as a reminder that these meanings of spying, like the meanings of genomics discussed in this essay, are being renegotiated under the changed circumstances of the post-Cold War world. On this latter point—especially as it has to do with the accelerated flows of detailed public information on natural resources, economic indicators, and so on, and the challenge these speeds present to the CIA analyst — see Herbert E. Meyer, “Reinventing the CIA,” Global Affairs (Spring 1992), pp. 1-13. On the linkages between spying, terrorism, and speed, see James Der Derian, “Spy Versus Spy: The Intertextual Power of International Intrigue,” in International/ Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics, ed.J ames Der Derian and Michael J. Shapiro (Lexington, Mass Lexington Books, 1989), pp. 163–187.
See Michael Fortun, “Mapping and Making Genes and Histories: The Genomics Project in the United States, 1980-1990,” unpublished doctoral dissertation, History of Science, Department Harvard University, 1993.
Paul Virilo, Speed and Politics, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York Semiotext(e), 1986 [1977]), pp. 119–120.
Verena Andermatt Conley, “Eco-Subjects,” in Rethinking Technologies, ed.V.A. Conley. (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 87.
Robert G. Martin, “Why Do the Human Genome Project?” NIHAA (National Institutes of Health Alumni Association) Update 1, Autumn 1989, pp. 4–5.
Bernard Davis, “What’s the Big Hurry? — Thoughts on the Human Genome Project,” NIHAA (National Institutes of Health Alumni Association) Update 7, Autumn 1989, pp. 6–7.
Quoted in Larry Casalino, “Decoding the Human Genome Project: An Interview With Evelyn Fox Keller,” Socialist Review 91/2 (1991), p. 114.
Virilio, Speed and Politics, p. 47.
See Joan Fujimura’s elaborations of the oncogene “bandwagon” (with all its implicit speed metaphors) as constructed with the aid of the standardized packages of theory, instruments, and craft skills of molecular biology: “Constructing Doable Problems in Cancer Research: Articulating Alignment,” Social Studies of Science, 17 (1987), pp. 257–293; “The Molecular Biological Bandwagon in Cancer Research: Where Social Worlds Meet,” Social Problems, 35 (1988), pp. 261-283; “Crafting Science: Standardized Packages, Boundary Objects, and “Translation,” in Science as Practice and Culture, Andrew Pickering, ed., (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 168-211; and Crafting Science, Transforming Biology: The Case of Oncogene Research (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, forthcoming).
This claim of Bios Laboratories’ marketing director, Deborah Consiglio, also points to the kind of genre jumping that genomics publications are now made to perform: according to her, Bios’s product line has been “cited in 38 publications since 1990,” qualifying it as “the most mentioned product line in the short history of the Human Genome Project.” The fact that “they’re in the literature as bona fide products… makes the marketing considerably easier.” Quoted in Fred Gebhart, “Bios Labs Aims to Be Top Supplier to Human Genome Project Researchers,” Genetic Engineering News, June 1, 1992, p. 20.
Office of Technology Assessment, U.S. Congress, “Issues of Collaboration: Transcript of a Workshop held June 26, 1987,” (Springfield, VA National Technical Information Service, U.S. Department of Commerce, PB88-162797), pp. 113–115.
As a related note, one of Aaron Wildavsky’s conclusions about the politics of genetic engineering is that “while efforts at regulatory control are likely to be tried, they are even more likely to fail,” primarily because “the speed of discovery is so great that regulation cannot keep up with it. There are too many holes in too many dikes for a regulator to keep a finger in all or more of them.” Aaron Wildavsky, “Public Policy,” in The Genetic Revolution: Scientific Prospects and Public Perceptions, ed. Bernard D. Davis (Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 96.
See Mark Skolnick, H.F. Willard, and L.A. Menlove, “Report of the Committee on Human Gene Mapping by Recombinant DNA Techniques.” Cytogenetics and Cell Genetics, 37 (1983), p. 210; and Robert S. Sparkes, “Human Gene Mapping Workshop VII,” American Journal of Human Genetics, 35 (1981) p. 1334.
See Albert de la Chapelle, “The 1985 Human Gene Map and Human Gene Mapping in 1985,” Cytogenetics and Cell Genetics, 40 (1985) p. 1.
Ibid., p.6.
H.F. Willard et al., “Report of the Committee on Human Gene Mapping by Recombinant DNA Techniques,” Cytogenetics and Cell Genetics, 40 (1985), pp. 360, 363.
Frank Ruddle and Kenneth K. Kidd, “The Human Gene Mapping Workshops in Transition.” Cytogenetics and Cell Genetics, 51 (1989), pp. 1–2.
Ibid.
For all their foresight, however, the committee still thought in very modest — i.e., slow-terms as far as information storage and retrieval went. The results of mapping workshops, they suggested, “could be kept in the Gene Library computer system at Yale University and could be distributed with Dr. McKusick’s Human Gene Map Newsletter.” See Mark Skolnick and U. Francke, “Report of the Committee on Human Gene Mapping by Recombinant DNA Techniques,” Cytogenetics and Cell Genetics, 32 (1982), p. 195.
Interview conducted by the author, Cornell University, October.
For a precise account of the difficulties and annoying obstacles to speed presented by so-called “standardized” techniques and packages, see Kathleen Jordan and Michael Lynch, “The Sociology of a Genetic Engineering Technique: Ritual and Rationality in the Performance of the Plasmid Prep,” in The Right Tools for the Job: At Work in Twentieth Century Life Sciences, eds. A.E. Clarke and J.H. Fujimura. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
Ibid.
See G. Christopher Anderson, “Genome Database Booms As Journals Take the Hard Line,” The Scientist, October 30, 1989, p. 4.
See ibid.; see also Christian Burks, “How Much Sequence Data the Databanks Will Be Processing in the Near Future,” in Biomolecular Data: A Resource in Transition, ed. Rita Colwell (Oxford Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 17–26.
U.S. Congress, House. Biotechnology Competitiveness Act of 1988. 100th Congress, 2nd session, October 13, 1988, report 100–992, p. 1.
For further analysis of criticisms of the “Human Genome Project” in the United States; see Fortun, “Making and Mapping Genes and Histories”. See also Robert Cook-Deegan, The Gene Wars: Science, Politics, and the Human Genome (New York W.W. Norton and Co., 1994); and Daniel J. Kevles and Leroy Hood, “Reflections,” in The Code of Codes: Scientific and Social Issues in the Human Genome Project, ed. Kevles and Hood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 300-328.
U.S. Congress Senate, Subcommittee on Energy Research and Development, Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, The Human Genome Project, July 11, 1990, 101st Congress, 1st Session, S. Hrg. 101-894, p. 119.
Author’s transcript of taped discussion at Cold Spring Harbor meeting, “The Molecular Biology of Homo Sapiens,” June 1986; tape recording deposited at the Human Genome Archive, National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature, Georgetown University, Washington, DC; see also Fortun, “Making and Mapping Genes for Histories” for further analysis of excerpts from this important meeting in the historiography of “the Human Genome Project.”
U.S. Senate, The Human Genome Project, p. 101.
Capital itself, as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari note, is reorganizing itself into new speed regimes, wherein “at the complementary and dominant level of integrated (or rather integrating) world capitalism, a new smooth space is produced in which capital reaches its “absolute” speed, based on machinic components rather than the human component of labor…. The present day accelerated forms of the circulation of capital are making the distinctions between constant and variable capital, and even fixed and circulating capital, increasingly relative; the essential thing is instead the distinction between striated capital and smooth capital, and the way in which the former gives rise to the latter through complexes that cut across territories and States, and even the different types of States.” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press, 1987) p. 492. For a discussion of the uses and meanings of “striated” and “smooth” in their topological recasting of philosophy, see ibid., pp. 474-500, pp. 363-374; see also Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), p. 6.
E-mail communication between Charles DeLisi and David Smith, December 30-31, 1985. “DOE Policies” file, Box BCD7, Human Genome Archive, National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature, Georgetown University, Washington, DC; see also Fortun, “Making and Mapping Genes and Histories,” pp. 88-91.
Quoted in Stephen S. Hall, “James Watson and the Search for Biology’s ‘Holy Grail’,” Smithsonian, February 1990, p. 46.
U.S. Senate, The Human Genome Project, p. 33.
James D. Watson, “APersonal View of the Project,” in The Code of Codes: Scientific and Social Issues in the Human Genome Project, ed. Daniel J. Kevles and Leroy Hood (Cambridge Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 164–165.
Paul Virilio, Popular Defense and Ecological Struggle (New York Semiotext(e), 1990), p. 87.
Barney G. Glaser and Anselm L. Strauss, Status Passage (Chicago: Aldine, 1971), p. 39.
Cook-Deegan, The Gene Wars, p. 131.
It is important to see this not as a one-way relationship — i.e., money producing tools — but more as the kind of “cycle of credit” described long ago (!) by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar: Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar in Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 187–233.
Cook-Deegan, The Gene Wars, pp. 130–131.
National Research Council, Mapping and Sequencing the Human Genome (Washington, DC National Academy Press, 1988), pp. 2–3.
In the course of my fieldwork on the “Human Genome Project,” on several occasions, I heard stories about so-and-so from such-and-such institution, who got a grant that had a low priority score but was funded because of his connections with someone on the advisory panels or study groups. Because such remarks are generally made “off the record,” they don’t get built into our knowledge about genomics. Earl Lane, a reporter on the genomics beat for the New York daily Newsday, began to detail how genomics proponents who had served on the important “advisory” and “evaluative” panels to the HGP “stand to receive millions of dollars over the planned fifteen-year life of the program.” See Earl Lane, “The Funding Ruckus,” Newsday, October 23, 1990, p. 21, Lane also heard several such stories and requested through the Freedom of Information Act the raw priority scores of applicants to the National Center for Human Genome Research, a request that was denied, appealed by Lane, and the appeal denied by the Assistant Secretary for Health on the basis that, contrary to Lane’s claims, such scores were evaluative in nature and their release would violate the privacy of researchers. (Earl Lane, personal communication, March 18, 1992)
Jeffrey L. Fox, “Faster and More Accountable Genome Project,” Bio/Technology, 10, February 1992, p. 120.
Gina Kolata, “Biologist’s Speedy Gene Method Scares Peers But Gains Backer,” New York Times, July 28, 1992, p. Clff.
See Edmund L. Andrews, “U.S. Seeks Patent on Genetic Codes, Setting off Furor,” New York Times, October 21, 1991, pp. Alff; Robin Eisner, “Biotechnology Community Mixed on NIH’s Gene-Patenting Efforts,” The Scientist, December 9, 1991, pp.lff.; Patrick D. Kelly, “Are Isolated Genes “Useful’?” Bio/Technology 10, January 1992, p. 52; Leslie Roberts, “OSTP to Wade into Gene Patent Quagmire,” Science, 254 (1991), pp. 1104-1105; Leslie Roberts, “NIH Gene Patents, Round Two,” Science, 255 (1992), pp. 912-913; Leslie Roberts, “Scientists Voice Their Opposition,” Science, 256 (1992), pp. 1273-1274; Leslie Roberts, “Rumors Fly Over Rejection of NIH Claims,” Science, 257 (1992), p. 1855; and Scott Veggeberg, “Controversy Mounts Over Gene Patenting Policy,” The Scientist, April 27, 1992, pp. 1ff.
Kolata, “Biologist’s Speedy Gene Method…,” p. C10.
Quoted in Eisner, “Biotechnology Community Mixed…,” p.10.
Ibid.
All quotes from Mark D. Adams et al., “Complementary DNA Sequencing: Expressed Sequence Tags and Human Genome Project,” Science, 252 (1991), pp. 1651–1656.
Quoted in Kolata, “Biologist’s Speedy Gene Method”, p. Cl.
Walter A. McDougall,…the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York Basic Books, 1985); Dale Carter, The Final Frontier: The Rise and Fall of the American Rocket State. (London: Verso, 1988).
McDougall, …the Heavens and the Earth, p. 7.
Carter, The Final Frontier, p. 10.
Dr. Elke Jordan’s response to BIONET letter of Michael Syvanen et al. (no date; sometime in spring of 1990), “Domenici Hearing 7/11/90” folder, Box BCD7, Human Genome Archive, National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature, Georgetown University, Washington, DC.
One final example of the conflict of speed regimes: at the Human Genome I meeting in 1989, Watson discussed “the ethics thing,” expressing his commitment to individual privacy but also suggesting, “I think we don’t want people rushing around passing laws without a lot of serious discussion.” (James D. Watson, “Organization: NIH,” address delivered at Human Genome I, San Diego, California, October 2-4, 1989, author’s transcript). Having hundreds of scientists “rushing around” redefining the body and the ethical and social relationship between bodies is unproblematic, while any acceleration of the more “social” (i.e, regulatory or legal) regimes of action is cause for extreme concern.
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Fortun, M. (1999). Projecting Speed Genomics. In: Fortun, M., Mendelsohn, E. (eds) The Practices of Human Genetics. Sociology of the Sciences, vol 21. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4718-7_2
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