Regulating genetic engineering guided by human dignity, not genetic essentialism

How might a liberal democratic community best regulate human genetic engineering? Relevant debates widely deploy the usually undefined term “human dignity.” Its indeterminacy in meaning and use renders it useless as a guiding principle. In this article, I reject the human genome as somehow invested with a moral status, a position I call “genetic essentialism.” I explain why a critique of genetic essentialism is not a strawman and argue against defining human rights in terms of genetic essentialism. As an alternative, I propose dignity as the decisional autonomy of future persons, held in trust by the current generation. I show why a future person could be expected to have an interest in decisional autonomy and how popular deliberation, combined with expert medical and bioethical opinion, could generate principled agreement on how the decisional autonomy of future persons might be configured at the point of genetic engineering.

The role of genetic essentialism and genetics knowledge in support for eugenics and genetically modified foods

People are regularly exposed to discussions about the role of genes in their lives, despite often having limited understanding about how they operate. The tendency to oversimplify genetic causes, and ascribe them with undue influence is termed genetic essentialism. Two studies revealed that genetic essentialism is associated with support for eugenic policies and social attitudes based in social inequality, and less acceptance of genetically modified foods. These views about eugenics and genetically-modified foods were especially evident among people who had less knowledge about genes, potentially highlighting the value of education in genetics.

A framework for understanding health inequalities over the life course: the embodiment dynamic and biological mechanisms of exogenous and endogenous origin

Understanding how structural, social and psychosocial factors come to affect our health resulting in health inequalities is more relevant now than ever as trends in mortality gaps between rich and poor appear to have widened over the past decades. To move beyond description, we need to hypothesize about how structural and social factors may cause health outcomes. In this paper we examine the construction of health over the life course through the lens of influential theoretical work. Based on concepts developed by scholars from different disciplines, we propose a novel framework for research on social-to-biological processes which may be important contributors to health inequalities. We define two broad sets of mechanisms that may help understand how socially structured exposures become embodied: mechanisms of exogenous and endogenous origin. We describe the embodiment dynamic framework, its uses and how it may be combined with an intersectional approach to best capture how intermeshed oppressions affect social exposures which may be expressed biologically. We explain how this framework may be a tool for carrying out research and provide scientific evidence to challenge genetic essentialism, often used to dismiss social inequalities in health.

Framework for understanding health inequalities over the life course: the embodiment dynamic and biological mechanisms of exogenous and endogenous origin

Understanding how structural, social and psychosocial factors come to affect our health resulting in health inequalities is more relevant now than ever as trends in mortality gaps between rich and poor appear to have widened over the past decades. To move beyond description, we need to hypothesise about how structural and social factors may cause health outcomes. In this paper, we examine the construction of health over the life course through the lens of influential theoretical work. Based on concepts developed by scholars from different disciplines, we propose a novel framework for research on social-to-biological processes which may be important contributors to health inequalities. We define two broad sets of mechanisms that may help understand how socially structured exposures become embodied: mechanisms of exogenous and endogenous origin. We describe the embodiment dynamic framework, its uses and how it may be combined with an intersectional approach to examine how intermeshed oppressions affect social exposures which may be expressed biologically. We explain the usefulness of this framework as a tool for carrying out research and providing scientific evidence to challenge genetic essentialism, often used to dismiss social inequalities in health.

Reconstructing Sociogenomics Research: Dismantling Biological Race and Genetic Essentialism Narratives

We detail the implications of sociogenomics for social determinants research. We focus on education and race because of how early twentieth-century scientific eugenic thinking facilitated a range of racist and eugenic policies, most of which helped justify and pattern racial and educational morbidity and mortality disparities that remain today, and are central to sociological research. Consequently, we detail the implications of sociogenomics research by unpacking key controversies and opportunities in sociogenomics as they pertain to the understanding of racial and educational inequalities. We clarify why race is not a valid biological or genetic construct, the ways that environments powerfully shape genetic influence, and risks linked to this field of research. We argue that sociologists can usefully engage in genetics research, a domain dominated by psychologists and behaviorists who, given their focus on individuals, have mostly not examined the role of history and social structure in shaping genetic influence.

The Role of Genetic Essentialism and Genetics Knowledge in Support for Eugenics and Genetically Modified Foods

People are regularly exposed to discussions about the role of genes in their lives, despite often having limited understanding about how they operate. The tendency to oversimplify genetic causes, and ascribe them with undue influence is termed genetic essentialism. Two studies revealed that genetic essentialism is associated with support for eugenic policies and social attitudes based in social inequality, and less acceptance of genetically modified foods. These views about eugenics and genetically-modified foods were especially evident among people who had less knowledge about genes, highlighting the value of education in genetics.

Exploring people’s thoughts about the causes of ethnic stereotypes

Much research has shown that people tend to view genes in rather deterministic ways—often termed genetic essentialism. We explored how people would view the causes of ethnic stereotypes in contexts where human genetic variability was either emphasized or downplayed. In two studies with over 1600 participants we found that people viewed ethnic stereotypes to be more of a function of underlying genetics after they read an article describing how ancestry can be estimated by geographic distributions of gene frequencies than after reading an article describing how relatively homogeneous the human genome was or after reading a control essay. Moreover, people were more likely to attribute ethnic stereotypes to genes when they scored higher on a measure of genetic essentialism or when they had less knowledge about genes. Our understanding of stereotypes is a function of our understanding of genetics.