Summing it all up

Well, no, not really.  If there is one lesson I am definitely taking away from Biopolitics then it is that it’s hard to actually ever really sum anything up.  At least not anything currently debated or up for debate or anything that involves any possible disagreement.  All we can do with the uncertainty of things in development and the promises associated with those things is attempt to keep up or to maintain a set of tools for keeping up.  But though we cannot be sure about what the shape of things will be tomorrow, I like the idea that that un-sureness—or as Fortun would put it: chiasma!—doesn’t mean we don’t have to do our due diligence; that we don’t have to wrestle with the various important issues involved in the life sciences.  Though now what we are dealing with seems to amount to promises built upon other promises—those promises necessitate planning and preparedness.  To plan means to discuss and to remain open to the possibilities of debate from every side of any issue that seems contingent upon these abundant promises and their abundant potential.  Potential that does not have positive implications for everyone involved.

The potential problems that seem to be necessary corollaries do have a fairly effective summation within the debate over consent.  The difficulties involved in attempting to ascertain what can actually be considered informed consent constitute a main source of contention in the current ethical debates revolving around research in the life sciences.  What does consent entail?  Can you be assumed to have consented?  Can an entire country?  Can we really account for all the potential uses our genetic material may be used for in the future?  In Iceland these issues ultimately resulted in the derailing of deCode’s initiative involving the database.  But before it even got that far there was a lot of discussion from a lot of different sources about Icelanders being guinea pigs and happy to be such.  it is more than a little disturbing that so few people questioned the implications of that belief.  When we presume that a group of people is fit for something without recourse to what they actually think and feel about the matter we are depriving them of their freedom of choice.  This has implications far beyond Iceland and we should be careful to pay attention to the goings on of the various actors within the various fields involved in issues of biopolitics.