Reprogramming Genomes and Reframing Rights: Legal Cultures of Cloning
13 June 2006, 16:00, EMBL Large Operon
Giuseppe Testa, Laboratory of Stem Cell Epigenetics, European Institute of Oncology, Milan
What is a clone? Different legal and political systems have been struggling with this apparently simple question for the past decade, in the process of crafting policies to regulate, accommodate or resist some of the latest developments in human biotechnology. The result of this collective and fragmented effort is a rich tapestry of options that reach beyond the issue of cloning and represent various models of coping with technological change; models that pose genuine challenges to the traditional view of science as a universal neutral practice automatically at ease within increasingly globalized economies and societies.
I refer here to genome reprogramming as both the growing body of knowledge which blurs previously established borders between lineages in terms of cell identity and differentiation potential, and increasingly also the technology, which enables to derive from a variety of adult cell types either embryos (as in therapeutic and reproductive cloning), ES cells, gametes, or else embryonic lineages.
The aim of my work is twofold. First, I would like to understand how the same scientific-technological objects (in this example the clones) come to be framed in entirely different ways in different political cultures. I will present a comparative analysis of different legislations within Europe and the United States that points to the multiple ways in which scientific developments and political practices co-produce each other and traces the underlying assumptions that have inspired both scientific inquiry and political action.
The second aim of my work is to identify the challenges that the variegated regulatory landscape described above poses for the governance of biotechnology in the global age. This appears to be one of the main sites in which the theories and practices of democracy are being tested and questioned. For the past three decades governments and courts have been charting the most uncertain terrain between the embryo in vivo and the embryo in vitro, but now yet other problematic and fascinating artifacts are coming to the fore: the various reprogrammable states of our genome and their biological derivatives. And the search for new paradigms to describe cell lineages and the unforeseen flexibility of their supporting genetic networks, combined with the technology to imitate, control and ultimately stretch this flexibility for defined goals, are clearly reprogramming not only genomes and cells, but much more profound notions about what is private or public in our relationship with our bodies.