I entered graduate school in the late 1990s, straight out of college. I held dual honors degrees in chemistry and biochemistry from Purdue, which meant I spent much of the time I should have been doing fun undergraduate things sitting in graduate-level seminars in molecular biology. The Human Genome Project hung in the air, like a miasma. I spent much of my senior year arguing with would-be engineers who enthused about the power of genetics to rebuild people, society, the world. I fled to a history of science program, wanting to understand how geneticists had, seemingly overnight, become public authorities on nearly everything.
Unbeknownst to me, the very institutions responsible for the Human Genome Project were also bankrolling boom times for historians, sociologists, and philosophers of biology. Beginning in 1990, the National Human Genome Research Institute committed 3 percent of its budget to studying what became known as “ELSI” issues: the ethical, legal, and social implications of the Human Genome Project. The cut-out soon increased to 5 percent; by 1995, the program had funded 125 research projects that resulted in the publication of over 150 journal articles and books. And this was just the beginning—the program’s archived reports at Genome.gov are fascinating time capsules of genetics futurity.
The works produced by these grants filled my grad-student bookshelves. At some point, they drifted down to the basement, where they nestled undisturbed until I uncovered these two gems in a burst of holiday-weekend pandemic cleaning:
The pink one is called Controlling our Destinies (2000), which should give you a pretty good sense of how ELSI researchers appealed to their funders’ sense of importance. Despite the title, this is the more critical of the two works, featuring solid contributions on the history of eugenics and the Cold War-era relationship between the national security complex and genetics research. That said, it also includes multiple essays speculating on whether genetics should be considered a new kind of theology, so.
Code of Codes was published earlier (1992) and includes a contribution from James Watson, who at the time was director of the Human Genome Project. The ESLI Program was Watson’s idea, and both his own essay and the preface to the volume make clear why: Watson and his allies wanted to defuse the public’s potential opposition to genetic research. As Watson himself put it, “We have to convince our fellow citizens somehow that there will be more advantages to knowing the human genome than to not knowing it.” (173) In the preface, after referring to a sequenced human genome as a “holy grail,” volume editors Daniel Kevles and Leroy Hood write that “it is not too early to begin thinking about how to control the power so as to diminish—or better yet, abolish—the legitimate social and scientific fears.” (viii)
The original point of the ELSI project, in other words, wasn’t to resolve the underlying ethical/legal/social/moral implications, but rather to make the public comfortable with the kinds of problems likely to follow. The idea was that researchers from a variety of nonscientific fields could “help” geneticists identify the “concerns” that members of the public might have about the project’s potential harm and develop policy “recommendations” to ensure that genetic information is “used” appropriately. It was about overcoming fears of a dystopian future, not building an alternative one.
As reluctant as I am to praise Jim Watson for anything, he deserves credit for recognizing that scientists needed help in thinking through the implications of the Human Genome Project. If you’re hellbent on doing something potentially sketchy, then, yes, by all means, it is wise to prepare for the consequences. But what’s unnerving about ELSI-type projects is their assumption that a scientific agenda is unstoppable—all the rest of us can do is “study” and “advise.” The Human Genome Project’s ELSI Program has funded a surprisingly wide range of studies but has never—to my knowledge—backed a project questioning its very existence. Nor does the ELSI framework envision a role for non-expert perspectives.
This is not an original critique, of course. People made this point at the time; even a grad student could pick up on the hallway chatter. Seeing these iconic books for the first time in twenty years, what jumped out at me wasn’t so much their obvious dependence on the goodwill of their funders, but rather how smoothly historians stepped right into a Cold War morass. Looking through the table of contents of Controlling our Destinies, it’s disorienting to see multiple essays about the Atomic Energy Commission’s role in funding Cold War-era genetics, knowing the volume was supported by a massive post-Cold War genetics project. The Human Genome Project’s 3 to 5 percent provision for ELSI issues is a striking callback to Cold War-era defense research contracts that typically allotted 5 percent of the funds for so-called basic research.
As a grad student, I understood this as a straightforward artifact of institutional sponsorships: The AEC became the Department of Energy, which became a cosponsor of the Human Genome Project. Ergo, a volume on the past, present, and future of the Human Genome Project contained essays on Cold War funding patterns that themselves echoed Cold War funding patterns. But I think there’s something deeper happening here. Many of the scholars who benefitted from the first wave of ELSI funding (e.g., Kevles) had themselves written trailblazing studies on science and the Cold War. In The Physicists (1977) and other key journal articles, Kevles argued that physicists in the United States gained significant professional autonomy and public power through their association with the national security state. He took this stance contra historian Paul Forman, who suggested that defense priorities had distorted the path of academic physics in the United States. I notice that Forman, unlike Kevles, kept his distance from the ELSI Program.
Having now written two books of my own on American scientists’ relationship to the Cold War, here’s what I think. Certainly, many academic scientists thought it was possible to channel the state’s money to their own ends. But I’m also pretty sure they believed they had more freedom and power than they actually did. They misunderstood the nature of their constraints. Our conclusions about the past shape our ability to move the present and build the future.
tl;dr: Look, we all gotta eat. But if Jim Watson offers you money to justify his pet project, don’t kid yourself about what you’re getting into. And think long and hard before signing up for any projects about “ethics in research” sponsored by Google, Clearview, Raytheon, etc. Critiques developed within the system are unlikely to reject the system’s premise.
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Watch: ELSI Programs are most closely associated with genetics research, but the approach has become dominant within the U.S. federal advisory apparatus. As of yet, we lack a book-length history of ELSI, but sociologist Alondra Nelson has delivered several lectures on the topic as part of her larger project on science advising in the Obama Administration. I particularly like this one, delivered at the Oxford Internet Institute, with its references to the “ELSI of everything.” (ELSI discussion starts at 27:07).
Listen: Another of my go-to scholars in understanding science and technology regulation is science studies scholar Shobita Parthasarathy. She has a great little article on the 1975 Asilomar Conference as a precursor to ELSI framework. But if you can’t access it (paywall), check out her excellent podcast, Received Wisdom.
Read: I haven’t actually read this yet, but Alondra Nelson says I should: Designing Human Practices describes anthropologists Paul Rabinow and Gaymon Bennett’s attempt to institutionalize a different approach to ELSI-type issues in the emerging discipline of synthetic biology. I gather it didn’t work out.
Unfinished business: Recordings of the “Pandemic, Creating a Useable Past” webinar I wrote about last time are now online. Thank you, AAHM and Princeton Department of History!