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Bioscience:Society edited by D. J. Roy, B. E. Wynne and R. W. Old,
Wiley, pp 409, £40

The question: ‘Do current and anticipated developments in bioscience
require a new covenant between science and society?’ provided the theme
for the Schering Foundation Workshop in 1990. The result is Bioscience:Society,
made up of 23 essays and four reports from working groups.

One group report describes the distinction between ‘science’ and ‘society’
as ‘a conceptual convenience that can cause confusion’. More than confusing,
the distinction serves as a barrier against probing the social content of
science – crucial for answering, or perhaps rewording, the above question.
In that regard the introduction expresses ambivalence about whether or how
values enter the biological sciences by asking: ‘What authority science
can and should exercise over values?’.

Contributors describe science and nature through various social metaphors:
genetic programs, DNA data (and even brain) banks, ecosystem services, genetic
farming, genome libraries, biological bank accounts, protein robots and
so on. Yet they provide little analysis of how those financial and industrial
concepts are being invested in nature, through the choice of R&D paradigms
for ‘discovering’ inherent properties of genes and biological systems. Indeed,
bioscience is reconceptualising natural processes, from human reproduction
to agriculture, as deficient mechanisms whose components, such as, DNA,
must be fixed or replaced to enhance operational efficiency. The concepts
and forces underlying bioscience, however, barely figure in the book’s discussion
of how to renegotiate its relation to society.

As the book does acknowledge, especially for human biology, some innovations
can threaten our sense of self-identity, while raising unrealistic hopes
for miracle cures. Perhaps less obvious is that bioscience tends to do so
by representing social problems as technical ones. For example, in discussing
the question, ‘Does bioscience threaten human integrity?’ the participants
examined technical advances that will allow us to eliminate more and more
genetic defects shortly after (or even before) conception. Such techniques
could help parents to choose whether to attempt or abort a pregnancy; they
would make the choice, not a state-controlled eugenics board.

Yet the contributors separate the social and technical aspects of such
choices. They overlook the subtle pressures that already lead parents to
abort a fetus if the resulting ‘imperfect’ child would burden them and/or
social services. They also ignore the pressures to broaden the definition
of a ‘genetic defect’. Also, despite caveats against labelling people as
‘genetically deficient’, some contributors speculate about a genetic basis
for manic depression or schizophrenia, which they treat as a property of
individuals while ignoring social sources of mental stress.

In the Nazi era, doctors (especially psychiatrists) welcomed and carried
out the labelling as ‘inferior’ of individuals destined for extermination.
Benno Muller-Hill of Koln warns that a more diffuse ‘genetic segregation’
might be imposed today through cost-benefit analysis by insurance companies,
employers, parents and others. That scenario could arise from the genetic
reductionism that another contributor celebrates, saying ominously, ‘With
the discovery of the genome, patients can be treated as individual beings’.
Thus individual needs and potentials become reduced to genetic properties.

Other participants acknowledge that overt conflict arises from ‘the
tension between recognized social values and the unstated values embedded
in scientific developments’, including the commercial interests guiding
them. It is suggested that bioscience can make such conflicts visible, so
that other social institutions can mitigate them; thus conflict could serve
as the ‘pathway to a robust agreement’ – a lasting covenant. If that is
to happen, the debate will have to go much further in identifying the implicit
values involved, as bioscience deploys particular social metaphors in redefining
nature and human nature.

Les Levidow, based at the Open University, is researching into the regulation
of risk for biotechnology.