Social Sciences, Bioethics, and the Question of Population

The deep interconnections between biology, population politics, and ethics have been strongly brought to the fore by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The virus has highlighted the ways in which governments and state machineries calculate, control, and manage entire populations and demographic groupings, akin to what Foucault refers to as ‘biopolitics’ (Burchell et al. 1991): through measures such as complete or partial lockdowns, contact tracing, clinical trials, and vaccination. These steps immediately raise several important ethical concerns around questions of discrimination, inequality, surveillance, security, privacy, right to healthcare, and social protection. In this special issue, we foreground the discussion of bioethics in relation to demography and population politics by focusing on the two most populous countries in the world, India and China. In the process, we seek to enhance our understanding of the ways in which biology is enmeshed with population politics and the nature of bioethical concerns this generates. In doing this, we are guided by the conceptualisation that population as bioresource is not only ‘bioavailable’ (Cohen 2007) but can be rendered into ‘biocapital’ as Rajan (2006) articulates in his study of clinical trial patients

Evolutionary Plasticity of Polycomb/Trithorax Response Elements in Drosophila Species

cis-Regulatory DNA elements contain multiple binding sites for activators and repressors of transcription. Among these elements are enhancers, which establish gene expression states, and Polycomb/Trithorax response elements (PREs), which take over from enhancers and maintain transcription states of several hundred developmentally important genes. PREs are essential to the correct identities of both stem cells and differentiated cells. Evolutionary differences in cis-regulatory elements are a rich source of phenotypic diversity, and functional binding sites within regulatory elements turn over rapidly in evolution. However, more radical evolutionary changes that go beyond motif turnover have been difficult to assess. We used a combination of genome-wide bioinformatic prediction and experimental validation at specific loci, to evaluate PRE evolution across four Drosophila species. Our results show that PRE evolution is extraordinarily dynamic. First, we show that the numbers of PREs differ dramatically between species. Second, we demonstrate that functional binding sites within PREs at conserved positions turn over rapidly in evolution, as has been observed for enhancer elements. Finally, although it is theoretically possible that new elements can arise out of nonfunctional sequence, evidence that they do so is lacking. We show here that functional PREs are found at nonorthologous sites in conserved gene loci. By demonstrating that PRE evolution is not limited to the adaptation of preexisting elements, these findings document a novel dimension of cis-regulatory evolution