{"id":21990,"date":"2016-12-12T10:00:06","date_gmt":"2016-12-12T14:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=21990"},"modified":"2016-12-21T11:57:57","modified_gmt":"2016-12-21T15:57:57","slug":"the-dangers-of-an-ahistorical-view-of-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2016\/12\/12\/the-dangers-of-an-ahistorical-view-of-science\/","title":{"rendered":"The Dangers of an Ahistorical View of Science"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"7050486303_86a1ff7351_z\"<\/a><\/p>\n

23andMe Co-Founder Anne Wojcicki
\nby Thomas Hawk on Flickr<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Anne Wojcicki\u2019s thinks<\/a> it\u2019s \u201cincredibly meaningful\u201d to honor scientists who are \u201cpurists\u201d who \u201clove what they do\u201d and have \u201cnever looked for any kind of celebrity.\u201d So she and a slew of other Silicon Valley technocrats gathered to recognize these altruistic innovators at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View last week\u00a0by giving them a spotlight on primetime network television and also $3 million each. At the event, called the Breakthrough Prize ceremony, the 23andMe CEO sat down with a reporter from Bloomberg to discuss the award, which, per her interviewer, should \u201cempower scientists just like technologists are empowered in silicon valley.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is most likely wishful thinking to presume that the curriculum for a Yale bachelors of science in molecular biology\u2014of which Wojcicki is a recipient\u2014would include the likes of Ludwick Fleck or Bruno Latour. The former, a physician and biologist, was the author of Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact<\/i>, originally published in Polish in 1935, though not translated into English until 1979. In it, Fleck tracks the history of research around syphilis, eventually outlining the concept of a \u201cthought-collective\u201d, a way to consider the social act of cognition\u2014that is, how an idea changes and is passed down through history, from and to different individuals and circles. Syphilis, argues Fleck, as it was first known at the end of the 15th<\/sup><\/span> century was not the same syphilis that was cured nearly 500 years later. Latour, whose breakthrough work, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Fact<\/i> (cowritten with Steve Woolgar), was published the same year as the English translation of Genesis and Development<\/i>, is most famous for enacting a sociology of science based on ethnography. He and Woolgar spent time in a laboratory watching how science is made\u2014from discussions regarding funding and publishing to actual work at lab benches.<\/p>\n

Reading Fleck and Latour help us realize that celebrating the individual is counter to how science works. Then again, to argue that the Breakthrough Prize should be more focused on the collective or that we should jettison the fantasy of a mad scientist isolated in a lab somewhere is to pretend like the Nobel Prize or MacArthur Genius Grant are not two of the highest honors bestowed in the field. But I have no interest in further critiquing this silly award show (which you can catch on Fox this Sunday night at 8\/7c!). Instead, I think it\u2019s worth paying close attention to what individuals like Wojcicki are saying and doing when it comes to how they see science in action\u2014a science they want us to believe is hindered by seeking to critique it through social and political lenses. One that is revolutionary in its own right, performed for the sake of truth, regardless of ulterior, capitalist motives.<\/p>\n

During the same Bloomberg interview, when asked for her thoughts on the impending the rich asshole administration, Wojcicki offered that \u201cI\u2019m a wait and see [kind of person]. I want to be able to judge once things are happening.\u201d This was December 4, 2016\u201426 days after the rich asshole was elected and started building his cabinet. Nine hundred and fifty six days after he tweeted that there are \u201cmany such cases\u201d of vaccines causing \u201cAUTISM\u201d. One thousand two hundred and eighty seven days since he argued that \u201cFracking poses ZERO health risks.\u201d And 1,463 days after he declared that \u201cThe concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.\u201d1<\/a><\/sup> What, exactly, is Wojcicki waiting for?<\/p>\n

According to the Silicon Valley executive, she’s waiting to find out who is going to determine the rules which govern her business: the heads of the Food and Drug Administration and Health and Human Services. She notes that she is glad to have found out who will run HHS, though she doesn\u2019t offer her opinions on the nomination of Representative Tom Price (R-Ga.)\u2014a man whose career has been marked by, per The Huffington Post<\/a>, \u201ca constant\u2026hostility to government interference with the practice of medicine.\u201d Instead, she declares that she is \u201cexcited about the idea of potentially more freedoms.\u201d Freedoms, one assumes, to go back to doing what made her company famous to begin with: using a customer\u2019s DNA to provide them with their probability of getting sick. 23andMe was ordered to stop doing exactly that when, in a November 2013 letter<\/a>, the FDA declared that \u201cMost of the intended uses for [23andMe results]\u2026have not been classified and thus require premarket approval or de novo classification.\u201d Simply put, the FDA didn\u2019t think it was appropriate for a company to tell its customers things that a doctor should be saying. This is, of course, the same FDA which is set to be run by Jim O\u2019Neill, noted<\/a> venture capitalist, libertarian, and Peter Thiel colleague.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s worth pointing out\u00a0here that, per the FEC database<\/a>, Wojcicki has given about a quarter million dollars worth of donations to Democratic Party candidates and committees over the past couple of years. This is a critical point, not because I think recognizing her support for the Clinton campaign and others is any sort of saving grace. Rather, we have to realize that the kind of rhetoric used here by Wojcicki and others\u2014about empowering \u201cscientists just like technologists\u201d or believing that \u201cwith things like the Breakthrough Prize\u2026it doesn\u2019t matter what the government is saying as much\u201d\u2014is not partisan. In an interview a week earlier<\/a>, she argued that an education system \u201cdecentralized down to the individual\u201d will empower our next generation of scientists.<\/p>\n

This is someone in charge of a private company collecting and storing over a million individuals\u2019 DNA data. And while she notes that the company does not sell that data to large biotech and pharmaceutical companies, it charges quite<\/a>\u00a0a premium<\/a>\u00a0to engage in \u201cresearch projects\u201d with those companies, eventually sharing \u201canonymized\u201d records with them. Combine this with the Breakthrough Prize and 23andMe becomes the gatekeeper and funder for research (not to mention the supplier\u2014their recent<\/a>\u00a0\u201cGenotyping Services for Research\u201d offering lets universities and other labs purchase kits for study participants, effectively outsourcing their genotyping\u00a0capabilities to Mountain View).<\/p>\n

When Jonas Salk\u2014whose institute was the subject of Latour\u2019s Laboratory Life\u2014<\/i>championed the development and reproduction of a polio vaccine, he didn\u2019t patent it. That\u2019s not to say, however, that he and his fellow researchers weren\u2019t properly funded (though it\u2019s worth noting he never won the Nobel Prize). Instead, money came pouring in from donations collected by an organization called the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, founded by FDR and eventually renamed the March of Dimes due to the small donations it received from citizens. To suggest that today’s scientists\u00a0use Salk as some sort of altruistic model is naive and not at all the goal of this blog post. But what are we left with when education and research and science are all \u201cdecentralized down to the individual\u201d? This is a dangerously ahistorical and anti-communal approach to science. What sort of rights or powers do we give up when we acquiesce to a system of research based on market-values and, as one Forbes contributor suggests<\/a> we do, buy into a system that \u201cgives real scientists more celebrity treatment through awards shows, television, movies, advertisements and other means\u201d? What happens when we treat science like a business, government like a menace, and the individual as the only way forward?<\/p>\n

1.<\/a> I won’t link directly to the rich asshole’s tweets, but for sources on my quotes, please see this piece from Scientific American<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Gabi Schaffzin<\/a> is not a scientist, though he once played the Wizard of Oz in a fifth grade production.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

23andMe Co-Founder Anne Wojcicki by Thomas Hawk on Flickr Anne Wojcicki\u2019s thinks it\u2019s \u201cincredibly meaningful\u201d to honor scientists who are \u201cpurists\u201d who \u201clove what they do\u201d and have \u201cnever looked for any kind of celebrity.\u201d So she and a slew of other Silicon Valley technocrats gathered to recognize these altruistic innovators at the NASA Ames […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967],"tags":[7540,1111,10632,8955,36391,12699,19908,43077,665,18940,43079,36392,43076],"class_list":["post-21990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","tag-23andme","tag-altruism","tag-bruno-latour","tag-dna","tag-donald-trump","tag-history-of-science","tag-jonas-salk","tag-ludwick-fleck","tag-science","tag-science-studies","tag-syphilis","tag-trump","tag-wojcicki"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2071"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21990"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21990\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22046,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21990\/revisions\/22046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}