Reporting Risk: The Case of Silicone Breast Implants

Professor Nelkin finds journalists to be, if reluctantly, subject to influence and describes their uneasy relationship with scientists in filling a difficult role

Los genes en la cultura popular de los medios

Las ideas de los genetistas han sido y son elementos susceptibles de abuso por parte de los medios de comunicación. La promoción de las explicaciones genéticas del comportamiento reflejan la tendencia de aplicar la impresión de la ciencia para dar un apoyo a una visión muy particular del mundo. La autora, especializada en la interacción prensa y ciencia, centra en el artículo algunas de sus principales áreas de investigación: terapia génica, reduccionismo y el papel que ha ejercido la prensa en todos los procesos de descubrimiento. = Genetists¿ ideas have been and continue to be elements susceptible of abuse by the media. Promoting genetic explanations for behavioral issues reflects a tendency to provide a scientific sway in order to support a very particular vision of the world. The author, who specializes in press/science interaction, focuses the article on some of the main research areas: gene therapy, reductionism and the role the press has exerted in all the discovery processe

The Jurisprudence of Genetics

In recent years, genetic research has ascended the list of national research priorities. From among the many weighty claims on the fisc, Congress has chosen to provide significant federal support for the Human Genome Initiative, a project aimed at mapping the complete set of genetic instructions that form the structure of inherited attributes. Geneticists anticipate that the project will disclose important new in- formation on human development and disease. Some go further. One influential scientist remarked that this work is the ultimate answer to the commandment \u27Know thyself.\u27 The decision to fund this Initiative, the largest biology project in the history of science, at a time of significant budgetary constraints suggests its political currency. Scientists have recently developed genetic tests, familiar from the diagnostic technologies used to identify genetic abnormalities in fetuses and newborn infants, to find the markers indicating predisposition to certain single-gene disorders such as Huntington\u27s disease. This success has bred the hope that more complex conditions, such as cancer, drug dependency, and mental illness, will ultimately be predictable and has enhanced the appeal of theories that explain human behavior in biological terms. Expectant parents now demand chromosomal testing of their babies before they are born and infertile couples often put considerable resources into the creation of genetically-related offspring. Institutions, including employers, insurers, and educators, look to biological tests to guide placement and avoid risk.\u2

Creating Natural Distinctions

At the 1991 CLAGS conference on The Homosexual Brain, Dorothy Nelkin argued that linking homosexual behavior to brain structure reflects in part the growing preoccupation with biological determinism in American culture. Responding to the expectation that defining homosexuality as a biological status will reduce prejudice, she suggested that genetic explanations in fact can serve multiple social agendas. In particular, they have in the past been used to justify social stereotypes and persistent inequities as natural and therefore inevitable. Thus, while biological claims could lead to greater tolerance for human differences, they can also lead to pernicious abuse. Ultimately, it is not biology but common beliefs and social biases that shape social policies. The appropriation of genetic explanations is the subject of a book by Dorothy Nelkin and M. Susan Lindee, The DNA Mystique: The Gene as a Cultural Icon. The following material, excerpted from this book, contains the core of Nelkin\u27s 1991 remarks

Cloning in the Popular Imagination

Dolly is a cloned sheet born in July 1996 at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh by Ian Wilmut, a British embryologist. She was produced, after 276 failed attempts, from the genetic material of a six-year-old sheep. But Dolly is also a Rorschach test. The public response to the production of a lamb from an adult cell mirrors the futuristic fantasies and Frankenstein fears that have more broadly surrounded research in genetics, and especially genetic engineering. Dolly stands in for other monstrosities—both actual and fictional—that human knowledge and technique have produced. She provokes fear not so much because she is novel, but because she is such a familiar entity: a biological product of human design who appears to be a human surrogate. Dolly as virtual person is terrifying and seductive—despite her placid temperament

Thinking like a man? The cultures of science

Culture includes science and science includes culture, but conflicts between the two traditions persist, often seen as clashes between interpretation and knowledge. One way of highlighting this false polarity has been to explore the gendered symbolism of science. Feminism has contributed to science studies and the critical interrogation of knowledge, aware that practical knowledge and scientific understanding have never been synonymous. Persisting notions of an underlying unity to scientific endeavour have often impeded rather than fostered the useful application of knowledge. This has been particularly evident in the recent rise of molecular biology, with its delusory dream of the total conquest of disease. It is equally prominent in evolutionary psychology, with its renewed attempts to depict the fundamental basis of sex differences. Wars over science have continued to intensify over the last decade, even as our knowledge of the political, economic and ideological significance of science funding and research has become ever more apparent

Claiming Equality: Puerto Rican Farmworkers in Western New York

n July of 1966, a group of Puerto Rican migrant workers protested against police brutality and discrimination in North Collins, a small farm community of western NewYork. Puerto Rican farmworkers made up a substantial part of the population, and had transformed the ethnic, racial, and gender landscape of the town. Local officials and residents produced and reproduced images of Puerto Ricans as inferior subjects within US racial and ethnic hierarchies. Those negative images of Puerto Ricans shaped the way in which local authorities elaborated policies of social control against these farmworkers in North Collins. At the same time, Puerto Rican farmworkers challenged those existing images and power relations that attempted to stigmatize them as inferior. They affirmed their presence in western New York and, in effect, stood up for their rights as citizens, as Puerto Ricans, and as Latinos