From the issue dated February 20, 2004
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v50/i24/24a01201.htm
The Humanities' New Muse: Genomics
Professors use federal money to explore what art says about genetics
By PETER MONAGHAN
On their first date, at a piano recital, Jerome and Irene lightly touch fingers. The look in both pairs of eyes says "love."
As they leave the concert hall, they pause before a poster of the evening's performer. No wonder he played like the dickens: The pianist has six fingers on each hand.
"That piece can only be played with 12; didn't you know?" Irene asks Jerome.
The scene is from Andrew Niccol's 1997 film, Gattaca, which has become a touchstone for scholars who study how genetic science makes its way into works of art.
In the futuristic movie, Jerome is an old-fashioned mortal who lives among the genetically perfected humans of his day. The Gattaca corporation, whose trade name is playfully fashioned from the four letters used to designate the DNA bases in the human genome – guanine, thymine, cytosine, and adenine – is the genetic gatekeeper for the astronauts of the future. Jerome is on his way to fulfilling his lifelong dream to go to outer space, by deceiving the rigorous biometric security devices that the company uses to screen employees like him and Irene, but his success at deception has consequences that make him feel imprisoned. The ominous aural allusion in the company's name to New York's notorious Attica prison suggests that we might all, one day, be trapped in a world where the breeding of dodecadigited concert pianists is the least of our worries.
In the past couple of decades, historians and cultural theorists have filled stacks of journals with studies of how writers, filmmakers, and artists have represented science – articles that scientists have often greeted with doubt, defensiveness, or simple disregard.
But genetic science is changing that. Financed by a $100,000, two-year grant from the National Human Genome Research Institute of the National Institutes of Health, Jay Clayton, a professor of English at Vanderbilt University; Priscilla Wald, an associate professor of English at Duke University; and 10 colleagues are analyzing portrayals of genetic science in a wide variety of genres. They are the first literature professors ever to receive a grant from the NIH.
Mr. Clayton says that the support from the NIH's Ethical, Legal and Social Implications Research Program signals the importance that at least one founder of the Human Genome Project – James D. Watson, of double-helix fame – placed on the social dimension of biotechnology. Mr. Watson insisted that 3 percent of the genomics project's funds be earmarked for such legal and ethical study.
Among the genres Mr. Clayton and the rest of his group are studying are fiction, science fiction, films, advertising, and commentary on genetic science and medicine. The last category includes press accounts about Dolly the cloned sheep, genetic discoveries linked to health and social issues, and reports on touchy issues like genetic screening, the patenting of genes, and genetically modified food.
Narrowing the Gap
"If we can get literature professors exploring the social implications of science in their classes," says Mr. Clayton, "we'll have a lot of effect on American culture."
One such effect may be to spur debate about genomics outside of the laboratory and the courtroom, says Alys E. Weinbaum, an assistant professor of English and women's studies at the University of Washington at Seattle, and a member of Mr. Clayton's research team. While the group's work may celebrate the imaginative achievements of works of literature and art, she says, "it's more about having some social and political questions that need to be addressed, and finding ways of communicating about them that are more democratic."
Unlike earlier studies of science by humanities scholars, research on culture and genomics is profiting from a great deal of support from scientists and medical researchers, says Ms. Wald. "We're not telling geneticists how to do genetics," she says. Still, she expects that only a minority will take an active role in the work.
That is right, says Robert Cook-Deegan, who directs Duke's Center for Genome Ethics, Law and Policy and is one the country's leading genetic ethicists: "Some people at the margins of genomics will be paying attention to what comes out of this project. And that's the way that change happens."
Genetic scientists will support the contributions of humanities scholars as long as they work diligently to understand the science involved – more diligently than many creative writers and artists have done, says Wylie Burke, a geneticist who heads the department of medical history and ethics at the University of Washington at Seattle. "Often what you see is an artist jumping on some glitzy idea that doesn't have a lot of scientific credibility," she says.
Mr. Clayton insists that "the gap between literature and science is narrowing. Literary people are much more interested in science than they were at the height of the cold war, when C.P. Snow invented that famous phrase, 'the two cultures.'"
Mr. Snow's two cultures were the centerpiece of a 1959 lecture given at the University of Cambridge that suggested that science and literature were light years apart, and would remain that way. But Mr. Clayton believes that genomics is a compelling subject for writers because it is "so tied to the body." And the way that the body is "tied to conceptions of identity" has been a major emphasis in cultural theory for 20 years.
Mr. Clayton began pondering this gap as he wrote Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture (Oxford University Press, 2003). The book explores some uncanny resonances between contemporary American culture and the 19th-century heritage that it supposedly repudiated, including the way that Dickens's expansive output in varied literary forms foreshadowed today's multiplicity of new information media. Mr. Clayton finds links between the telegraph and the Internet, Charles Babbage's difference engine and the digital computer, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein monster and the notion of cyborgs and clones.
Mr. Clayton's new project draws on an equally wide range of texts to place genetic science in a literary, cultural, and historic context. He is in a good position to do so. Each evening he can discuss genomics at the dinner table with one of the country's leading experts on its legal and ethical dimensions – his wife, Ellen W. Clayton. A professor of pediatrics and law at Vanderbilt who has often testified before Congress, she put Mr. Clayton and Ms. Wald in touch with Dr. Cook-Deegan, who became a staunch supporter of the group's activities. His reasons are, he says, simple: "It's good for the field [of genomics] to have folks who are familiar with how popular culture influences our thinking."
For now, says Mr. Clayton, the project's primary focus is on reaching literature professors. The "old dream of how to solve the two-cultures divide," he says, was that scientists and humanities scholars would read each other if they could just write clearly enough. "They don't," he says. Writing for literature, film, and cultural-studies professors, he says, "is what we're good at. So let's bring the full complexity of these issues to that audience."
Linguistic Fault Lines
It is hardly surprising that writers and artists juggle hope, expectation, fear, and despair when confronted by the next stage of human evolution. In the science-fiction trilogy Xenogenesis, for example, Octavia E. Butler describes a group of aliens traveling from planet to planet to merge their genome with that of other species to create a superior breed. "I get the sense when I read her books," says Mr. Clayton, "that she thinks that might be a good idea."
He notes that humanists often believe that their only contribution is to "object loudly." But, he continues, "that simplifies the ethical and philosophical issues. Technology is part of us."
Ms. Wald says that she and her colleagues "inspect texts for usage that belies confusion, or that misconstrues the reality of what scientists are doing." They also dissect the language and imagery that genomicists use.
Part of the "communication problem" between scientists and the public, suggests Celeste Michele Condit, a professor of speech communication at the University of Georgia, is "that scientists use a technical language that they believe is not to be dispensed with. They wouldn't put it this way, but their view is that if you don't understand their language, you don't understand genetics."
Yet, in interviews and focus groups, Ms. Condit has found that nonscientists have a surprising ability to understand the basics of genetic science and medicine, even if they cannot say what a recessive gene is. When asked to comment on, say, the controversial issue of prescribing certain drugs on the basis of race, "they are able to come up with every possible objection that experts could," she says. "They are shockingly good."
But certain terms confuse or distress nonscientists to the degree that scientists would do well to avoid them, she says. "Mutation" is one. "Lay people associate that with science fiction," she says, "so clinicians shouldn't use it when they're talking to patients with a genetic variation."
Scientists and literary critics also suffer communication glitches, notes Ms. Condit. When the research group that received the NIH grant met with scientists, she says, discussion bogged down at times because "we hit conventions of writing and proof that just were not translating."
Heather M. Schell, another member of the group, and an assistant professor of writing at George Washington University, agrees with that assessment. But she sees a way forward. "In the long run," she says, "we'll be educated in each other's styles of writing, or, ideally, we'll figure out some different writing conventions that will work for both humanities and science."
Scary Monsters and Race
Fiction lends a hand in that task, suggests Ms. Weinbaum. For example, she says, Ms. Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy does more than conjecture optimistically about the human future; it also suggests that genomics can be an inequitably distributed commodity. This perspective forms the basis of Ms. Weinbaum's book in progress, which has the tentative title Rethinking Reproductive Labor in Transnationalism. She is exploring what happens to the understanding of human reproduction when genomics becomes "one kind of commodity technology that's entered a global marketplace." She is examining the "sale of reproductive power," including gestational surrogacy, the market for body organs, and transnational adoption.
There again, she says, fiction, science fiction, and popular science literature will "serve as levers for prying open our understanding of the global reproductive economy. ... Literature is also part of the liberationist project of thinking about why we might want to be doing all this very differently."
In genomics as in culture at large, race remains a stumbling block to social justice, she argues. Genomics technologies are said "to reveal to us that race is a fiction," and that "race is something that's deeply constructed, socially." Yet, she says, those same technologies tend to reconsolidate existing racial hierarchies. "When you go to a fertility clinic to get donor eggs or sperm, you tend to do racial matching. So, what's reproduced is racial homogeneity and racial stasis." That is true not just of reproductive technologies, but also of gestational surrogacy, adoption, and other methods. "My question," she says, "is, 'What does it mean to announce that race doesn't exist, when racism so patently does? And where does scientific responsibility fall in such a context?'"
Genetics also figures in the coda to Ms. Weinbaum's forthcoming book, Wayward Reproductions: Genealogies of Race and Nation in Transatlantic Modern Thought (Duke University Press, April 2004), in which she discusses confluences between art and genomic and biotechnological science in a current exhibition, Gene(sis): Contemporary Art Explores Human Genomics.
The exhibition (http://www.gene-sis.net/home.html), was organized by Robin Held, a curator at the University of Washington at Seattle's Henry Art Gallery, and mounted in collaboration with artists and art historians, geneticists, science historians, and medical ethicists. (The exhibit is appearing at the University of Minnesota through May 2, 2004, and will move to Northwestern University from September 10 to November 28.)
Timothy Murray, a professor of English at Cornell University and one of the NIH grant recipients, also specializes in visual art. A special issue of the online art journal he co-edits, ctheory multimedia (http://ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu/issue2/issue_main.htm), titled "Tech Flesh: the Promise and Perils of the Human Genome Project," presents 14 pieces of experimental Internet art that reflect on genomics and its relations to the body, identity, race, business practices, and research.
Many of the artists he introduces, while clearly "techies," "are sometimes critical of the spin and brave-new-world language of genomics," he says. "They link, metaphorically, current research in genomics with earlier projects on eugenics and racial differentiation. This is both somewhat controversial and complicated because we know those links are more metaphoric than scientific."
"Many projects," he adds, "are trying to bring the body back to the table, as something that includes not only information bits and DNA material, but also emotions, feelings, attractivity, and so forth." But not all genomicists take well to such work, he notes. At meetings of genomics-and-culture researchers and scientists, Mr. Murray observes, "some were, it might be fair to say, skeptical of artistic interventions."
'Transgenic Artwork'
Some of the art rooted in genetics may have more to offer to the public than to scientists, such as a curious "transgenic artwork," by the artist Eduardo Kac, dubbed "GFP Bunny" (http://www.ekac.org/gfpbunny.html). The conceptual piece comprises texts, installations in public places, posters, performance art, photographs, and drawings, all of which feature Alba, a "green fluorescent protein" rabbit. Mr. Kac says it is a laboratory animal altered so that it glows under black light, and that it actually exists somewhere in France.
The University of Washington's Dr. Burke finds the work of "dubious" value, and its suggestion that humanity is on the verge of an era of genetic engineering a blind, unsubstantiated leap. But Susan McHugh, an assistant professor of English at New England University, says the effectiveness of work like Mr. Kac's is that it suggests "how commercial transgenics has entered into our daily lives." Representations such as "GFP Bunny" leave viewers uncertain where scientific reality and possibility lie.
Duke's Ms. Wald hopes that the new project will not just give a boost to the emerging area of genomics and the humanities, but that it will also alert hiring committees "that this is a subfield that is emerging in many different sites."
Mr. Clayton emphasizes the interdisciplinary aspects of the investigation that he and others are conducting. "This project is intended to be, and will be, a bit of a shaping force on the type of work we do," he says.
He and his colleagues in the project are preparing a collection of essays for Duke University Press. They also will create a web site where they will list texts and films relating to genomics, as well as summaries of their findings. In November, they will hold a public conference at Duke.
Most likely, the literature and film researchers who are contributing to the field, along with others from women's studies, anthropology, the history of science, and other disciplines, will not end up in departments of culture and genomics, suggests Lisa Lynch, an assistant professor of media studies at Catholic University of America. Because the field is inherently interdisciplinary, "I don't know if you'll see anything other than an interdisciplinary-studies research center here and there," she says.
The field will grow, she believes, because already the researchers doing the work, although often junior, are working with talented graduate students. "A few good conferences would bring them all out of the woodwork," she predicts.
The culture-and-genomics project, Ms. Wald says, is a real opportunity to be able to participate in the conversations before policy is formed.
"We have to tell people," she says, "that literary critics have something coming out of literary criticism to contribute."
Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
