Genomes in Geopolitical Relations

Genomes in Geopolitical Relations

This talk examines how genomes become political actors in transnational science collaborations in precision medicine. Precision medicine is the medical practice and political ambition of tailoring diagnostics, therapeutics, and prevention to the characteristics of the individual. The genome—the complete mapping of an individual’s DNA in digital form—plays a central role in this molecular and data-driven medical approach. Based on ethnography from a Danish precision medicine initiative to improve diagnosis and treatment for patients with diabetes, I unfold how this initiative faced unforeseen challenges due to its collaboration with the Chinese sequencing company Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI). In the Danish diabetes initiative, the patients’ genomes were depicted as at risk of leaving Danish ground and wandering off to BGI, possibly contributing to the development of bioweapons in China. I take inspiration from Freud’s concept of the uncanny and Vardoularkis’s discussion of the doppelgänger as a ‘goer’ to explore the imagined relationships, temporalities, and alliances of genomes at stake in the BGI controversy as it was depicted by the Danish press and experienced by the involved clinicians, researchers, and patients. I end by discussing the ethical challenges and uneasiness my social science team and I encountered in conducting the study from the overlapping positions of being partners in the diabetes research initiative and ethnographically investigating the controversy with BGI. I suggest that critical engagement is not simply a practice of bringing together social science and biomedicine, but also of bringing into conversation different understandings of what is worth knowing.

Bio

Mette N. Svendsen is Professor in the Centre for Medical Science and Technology Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Her research explores existential and political dimensions of medical science and technology. Theoretically, her work has crafted dialogues between science and technology studies, medical anthropology, and public health. Methodologically, she has developed innovative comparative approaches to investigate life and its value. She is the author of the monograph Near Human: Border Zones of Life, Species, and Belonging published by Rutgers University Press (2022).

Venue: Byrne House, University of Exeter (spaces limited)

Virtual: via Zoom

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