[Sci-tech-public] Reminder: STS Circle, April 23rd - Maggie Curnutte - (Please RSVP)

[STS]

*STS Circle at Harvard*
**
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*Maggie Curnutte
*
*Harvard, STS*
*
*
on

*I Consume, Therefore I Am: The Construction of the Genetic Citizen in the
United States*

 Monday, April 23rd
12:15-2:00 p.m.
124 Mt. Auburn Street, Suite 100, Room 106

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Lunch is provided if you RSVP.
Please RSVP to sts
<sts at hks.harvard.edu>@hks.harvard.edu<sts at hks.harvard.edu>by 5pm
Thursday, April 19th.
*
*
*Abstract:* 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.

*Biography*: 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. *
*******


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http://www.hks.harvard.edu/sts/events/sts_circle/
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