<font color="#660000" size="4"><b>STS Circle at Harvard</b></font><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div class="gmail_quote"><div class="gmail_quote"><div class="gmail_quote"><font color="#660000" size="4"><b></b></font><div class="gmail_quote">
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<div><font size="4"><b>Maggie Curnutte<br></b></font></div>
<i>Harvard, STS</i>
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<div><font color="#000000">on</font>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%"><span><b><span style="font-size:16.0pt;line-height:200%">I Consume, Therefore I Am: The Construction of the Genetic Citizen in the United States</span></b></span>
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<div>Monday, April 23rd<br></div>
<div><font color="#000000">12:15-2:00 p.m.</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">124 Mt. Auburn Street, Suite 100, Room
106<br><br></font></div>
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<div><font color="#000000">Lunch is provided if you RSVP.</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">Please RSVP to</font> <a href="mailto:sts@hks.harvard.edu" target="_blank"><font color="#000000">sts</font></a><a href="mailto:sts@hks.harvard.edu" target="_blank"><font color="#000000">@hks.harvard.edu</font></a><font color="#000000"> by
5pm Thursday, April 19th.</font></div>
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<div><b>Abstract:</b> Amongst the rhetoric of patient empowerment and patient rights, medicine has increasingly converged with consumer culture. Private industry is now offering services traditionally provided only by health care professionals. Two US-based companies, 23andMe and Navigenics, have circumvented the clinic to provide genetic testing directly to individuals. With a mail order kit, consumers collect their own DNA samples and obtain personally tailored information about their chances of developing certain genetic conditions. These companies have challenged norms that traditionally structured genetic testing, as is most evident in their confrontations with professional medical associations, the US Food and Drug Administration, and Congress. This paper focuses on a Congressional hearing in 2010 to dissect the various actors’ framings of the technology. I argue that two dominant criticisms have shaped the debate: either that the consumer cannot understand the medical implications of probabilistic genetic information, or that such information is a genetic horoscope given the questionable science backing such tests. Taking a broader view, however, these two positions are lodged within a new genetic testing apparatus that is restructuring the very power relationships and subjectivities around genetic information.<span></span>
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<div><b>Biography</b>: Maggie Curnutte is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Program on Science, Technology & Society (STS) at the Harvard Kennedy School. She received a PhD in the Foundations and Ethics of the Life Sciences from the University of Milan in 2012. At the University of Milan and while a graduate fellow in the STS Program, she wrote a dissertation on the direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing industry. Her comparative study of the two leading U.S. providers of DTC—23andMe and Navigenics—showed how DTC firms have challenged established norms for how we can and should relate to our genomes. Her current research continues to focus on the governance of emerging biotechnologies. She has conducted a cross-national study of direct-to-consumer genetic testing in the US, UK and Germany by tracing the availability of genetic testing for Alzheimer’s disease. She is also working on a project that looks comparatively at the ethical, legal, and social responses to research on human-animal mixtures. <i><br>
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<div><font color="#000000">A complete list of STS Circle at Harvard
events can be found on our website:</font></div>
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