Utilizing social semiotic approaches, this article addresses how genetic researchers’ organizing narratives have involved extensive ontological and epistemological violence in their objectification Karitiana Indigenous people of Western Brazil. The paper analyses how genetic researchers have represented the Karitiana in the US and Canadian courts, post-9/11 forensic identification technology development, and patents. It also considers disputes over the sale of Karitiana cell lines by the US National Institutes of Health-funded Coriell Cell Repositories. These case studies reveal how the prominent population geneticist (...) Kenneth K. Kidd of Yale University and other genetics researchers have constituted the Karitiana as Extreme Other; liminal figures who define the boundaries of humanity. Originally sampled in 1987 by a Yale University epidemiologist, forensic genetic researchers have since utilized Karitiana cell lines to metonymically represent the Karitiana. The practices of objectification have imposed a genetically distinct special status upon the Karitiana that restricts recognition of their self-determination, rights and dignity, and which imposes onerous obligations to serve as research objects for the greater good of Humanity. The Karitiana are included as biological labour, but excluded from decision-making or asserting any other claims. Scientists have organized and maintained biotechnologically-mediated colonial relationships in which they and their institutions extract nearly all immediate and tangible benefits. The fusing of genetic research’s ontological and epistemological violence with the violence of state legal institutions raises important questions about the scope and practices of sovereignty, particularly in determining and enforcing states of exception through violence. (shrink)

Taiwan has a population of 23 million, of which some 500,000 are Aborigines. Recent conflicts over a national biobank as part of Taiwan's biotechnological industrial development, genetic research on Aboriginal origins, and commercialization of research findings involving Aborigines have raised a number of important ethical conflicts. These ethical conflicts involve on one hand, the importance of researchers' duties, and on the other hand, Aboriginal rights. This paper will go in three steps. First, this paper describes the three cases of ethical (...) violations of Aboriginal rights committed by Taiwanese researchers in the course of their scientific duties. After having given an account of ethical conflicts between research duties and Aboriginal rights, the paper addresses larger ethical issues underlying this Taiwanese research context. Finally, the paper considers if stronger ethical regulation could reconcile Aboriginal rights and research duties. (shrink)

Taiwan has a population of 23 million, of which some 500,000 are Aborigines. Recent conflicts over a national biobank as part of Taiwan's biotechnological industrial development, genetic research on Aboriginal origins, and commercialization of research findings involving Aborigines have raised a number of important ethical conflicts. These ethical conflicts involve on one hand, the importance of researchers' duties, and on the other hand, Aboriginal rights. This paper will go in three steps. First, this paper describes the three cases of ethical (...) violations of Aboriginal rights committed by Taiwanese researchers in the course of their scientific duties. After having given an account of ethical conflicts between research duties and Aboriginal rights, the paper addresses larger ethical issues underlying this Taiwanese research context. Finally, the paper considers if stronger ethical regulation could reconcile Aboriginal rights and research duties. (shrink)

This paper utilizes Iris Marion Young’s critical, post-9/11 reading of Thomas Hobbes, as a theorist of authoritarian government grounded in fear of threat (Young 2003). Applying Young’s reading of Hobbes to the high-profile ethicist Julian Savulescu’s advocacy of genetic enhancement reveals an underlying unjust discrimination in Savulescu’s use of patriarchal protector–protected analogies between family and state. First, the paper shows how Savulescu’s concept of procreative beneficence, in which parents use genetic selection to have children who will have the best lives (...) possible, is unjustly discriminatory against marginalized groups. Increasingly, however, he has invoked public security to justify genetic interventions. In recent speeches, Savulescu has argued a global state of emergency is developing due to a combination of the global environmental crisis, the threat of bioterrorism, and the failure of liberalism. To help deal with this emerging state of emergency, Savulescu advocates an unjustly discriminatory array of genetic-based governance practices, including detention and segregation. (shrink)