Biocracy

Public Policy and the life Sciences

Lynton Keith Caldwell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367163716
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429721939
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Biocracy, a term invented by physiologist Walter Bradford Cannon, refers to the influence of biological science on society and its public policies. Beginning with the prophetic essay "Biopolitics: Science, Ethics, and Public Policy,†this book addresses various aspects of the relationships among the life sciences, society, and government. Included in the topics considered are some of the more critical issues of our time: the social responses to life science innovations; health and homeostasis as social concepts; the relationship between history and biology and that between the life sciences and the law; biocratic interpretations of ethical behavior and biopolitical conflicts; and the options, risks, and international consequences of biotechnology. Caldwell's book is a collection of articles that he wrote on this subject over a period of twenty-five years. Of the ten chapters, four have previously appeared in scholarly journals but have undergone extensive editorial revisions appropriate to this publication. The remaining six chapters have been presented at various professional meetings but have not hitherto been available in print.

1
Biopolitics: Science, Ethics, and Public Policy

Some years ago a front page column of the now defunct New York Herald Tribune carried a whimsical description of a new science of biopolitics,¹ The sensitive reader might well have been as distressed as amused by the wry humor of the columnist. J. P. Miller, already secure in his reputation for social criticism through satire in Days of Wine and Roses, recounted an imaginary interview between an official government biopolitician and a newspaper reporter regarding the meaning of a “new science.” The episode was in fact a miniature morality play— an allegory intended to pose a distasteful question in a palatable manner.

Defined by Miller, “biopolitics is the science of proving that what must be done for political reasons is biologically safe for the human race.” The reported interview occurred sometime after 1971 when the collapse of the nuclear test ban treaty had been followed by a resumption of massive testing in the atmosphere and rising levels of fallout. In order to relieve popular fears, prevent panics and antigovernment demonstrations, official biopoliticians “proved scientifically that the previous human tolerances to radioactivity and all other by-products of nuclear testing, including strontium 90, had been estimated far too low.” The official pronouncement “had a wonderful calming effect on the people.” Public confidence was restored.

“But,” asked the reporter, “suppose that an increase in bone cancer was being caused by heavy concentrations of strontium 90 in human and animal marrow?” Some unofficial scientists said so. But the official biopolitician replied that statements which frightened people were certainly not in the public interest. “Bone cancer and strontium 90 could not be linked,” he declared. “The people wouldn’t like it. Therefore, by definition it is biopolitically impossible.” Consistent in the tradition of the moralizing fable, Miller posed one of the biggest, toughest questions of our time: Are science and politics really compatible? The philosopher-dramatist with a sociological turn of mind puts the question that way. Presumably the social scientist could also—but there are difficulties. As “scientist” he finds it impractical to ask questions about the extent of man’s political capacities that the present state of knowledge does not permit him to answer. Moreover, the disciplines of social science have, in the main, tacitly assumed the infinite perfectability of mankind. To hypothesize that political man cannot or will not reshape his goals and values in the light of scientific knowledge seems disloyal to the traditions of liberalism and democracy. But while the question cannot be usefully posed in absolute and theoretical terms, it is by implication being posed daily in limited and practical situations.

In the language of politics, “it is a condition that confronts us— not a theory.” An explosion of biological knowledge and technology is raising questions of public policy which until recently were hypothetical, and were therefore, from a practical point of view, unreal. Whether there is, can, or should be in any sense a science of biopolitics can easily be dismissed as facetious. But the conscientious man grows uneasy when he reflects upon the mounting problems which the life sciences (in particular) are posing for political solution. There is certain to be more biology in politics, and this could mean, as J. P. Miller implied, more politics in biology.

Now twenty-five years after Miller’s 1963 scenario there is more biology in politics, but the issues are different and far more numerous. In 1963 the genetic effects of nuclear fallout was the major biopolitical issue. Since then a long list of biology-related problems has been compiled, continually being lengthened by new applications of biotechnology. The nuclear threat has not disappeared, but it has become one of many biopolitical issues, some of which are of more immediate and direct concern to people, for example, genetic engineering, screening for genetic defects, and a range of new technologies relating to human reproduction. Official government is no more comfortable with the new biotechnology than it was with the fallout issue. Bureaucratic anxiety to avoid exciting the public is still present, but today even in government, there is recognition that the advancing life sciences have significantly enlarged the political agenda and the issues must be addressed in an open and informed manner.

Science—Politics and Ethics

The scientist, the politician, and the philosopher, each in his own way is confronted by the question of how political reactions to an expanding, innovating biology will affect its application to the public happiness and welfare. And unfortunately for the policymakers, happiness and welfare do not always follow from the same course of action. Yet there are urgencies in our present biopolitical state of affairs that compel a reconciliation of ethical values and scientific facts in public policies involving the biological nature of man.

To focus attention upon these policy issues the term biopolitics affords a convenient shorthand expression, and will be used here in this context and without prejudice to the separate question of whether biopolitics, specifically, is becoming a legitimized area of interdisciplinary inquiry. Biopolitics, then, suggest political efforts to reconcile biological knowledge and popular values—notably ethical values—in the formulation of public policies. It is obviously a selective focus on a portion of the larger issue of the relationship of science to society. Important developments both in science and in society justify this selectivity.

During the first half of the twentieth century, spectacular developments in the physical sciences overshadowed major but less readily demonstrable advances in biology. Moreover, the impact of applied biology upon society often occurs on a time scale that obscures its effects—at least in the early stages. The human population explosion gained momentum as public health administration and medicine began to eliminate the “natural” controls over human reproduction. The explosion of population may be as inexorable and destructive as the explosion of nuclear energy, but the consequences of the nuclear bomb are all too readily observable whereas the potential consequences of what has been called “the population bomb” have been largely inferred through the dry and less convincing medium of statistics.

Although there is widespread and profound disagreement as to its implications, the population explosion on a global scale is now generally acknowledged. There is less awareness of a concurrent explosion of biological knowledge— an accelerating geometrical expansion of knowledge, culminating long years of accumulating inquiry in the various biosciences. It is the contemporary convergence of these two explosions— people and biology— that justifies, indeed necessitates, a focus on biopolitics.

That extraordinary advances in biological science and biotechnology have occurred and are continuing is hardly debatable. To this there has been informed and responsible testimony for some time. As early as 1964 Detlev W. Bronk, President of the Rockefeller Institute, stated that “… we have learned more about the nature of living matter and the mechanisms of living organisms during recent years than in all prior human history.”² And the rate of learning has accelerated.³ The revision of man’s perception of himself and of nature that the biological sciences may require could be as drastic as the changes made by the physical sciences in man’s perception of the cosmos. In 1963 journalist William K. Wyant, Jr., observed prophetically that “the rough jolts of the future, in the way man thinks of himself, will come from studies done with the microscope.”⁴

The more sensational speculations growing out of biological congresses make news headlines and sober editorials. Commenting on the unprecedented implications of the emerging biotechnology discussed at the 11th International Congress of Genetics, an editorial in the New York Times declared that “the moral, economic, and political implications of these possibilities are staggering” and then asked rhetorically, “is mankind ready for such power?”⁵ In the judgment of some of the most thoughtful students of man’s biopolitical behavior the answer is “No.” Representative of misgivings in the scientific community is the regretful observation of Theodosius Dobzhansky that man, comprehending the meaning of his biological evolution:

… should be able to replace the blind force of natural selection by conscious direction, based on his knowledge of nature and on his values. It is as certain that such direction will be needed as it is questionable whether man is ready to provide it. He is unready because his knowledge of his own nature and its evolution is insufficient; because a vast majority of people are unaware of the necessity of facing the problem; and because there is so wide a gap between the way people actually live and the values and ideals to which they pay lip service.⁶

Biopolitical Issues

Public unreadiness to use wisely an expanding biotechnology is not merely a speculative conclusion. Popular behavior and political action (or inaction) indicates prevailing attitudes toward biological realities. A cursory look at some of the current biopolitical issues suggest a mixed and contradictory picture. In each case a confrontation of biological facts, political exigencies, and ethical values occurs in the course of policymaking.

Biopolitical issues tend to fall into two general groups differing chiefly in the directness and generality of their effects. The first group may be termed environmental. Issues in this category arise when environments are impaired as a consequence of deliberate or inadvertent human action. During the 1960s the most widely publicized biopolitical issue concerned the health effects of radioactive fallout— an issue abruptly revived by the accident at Chernobyl, USSR in the summer of 1986. Meanwhile, the effects of toxic chemicals on human health and the environment emerged as a more widespread and complex set of concerns. The fluoridation controversy was an early case in point.⁷ Another was the danger of chemical poisoning through pesticides, dramatized by Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring, which engendered controversies described as “… disgraceful both from the scientific and social points of view.”⁸

For failure to anticipate environmental problems of scientific advances, the scientific community bears some responsibility. In a critique on environmental biology Rene Dubos took his fellow scientists to task for gross neglect of “… the problems posed by the response of the total organism to the total environment.”⁹ He argued that because medical science has not been provided with adequate scientific knowledge of “the effects of the total environment on the human condition,” the potentialities of medicine for human welfare will be severely restricted until this deficiency is remedied. When scientists themselves offer no adequate explanation of the responses of body and mind to the impact of modern technology, has the politician any choice other than to “trim” biological facts to fit political circumstance? If science cannot speak authoritatively regarding the threats to physical and mental health posed by “… constant and unavoidable exposure to the stimuli of urban and industrial civilization; by the varied aspects of environmental pollution; by the emotional trauma and often the solitude of life in congested cities; by the monotony, the boredom, indeed, the compulsory leisure of automated work…,” how can the politics of these issues be guided by science? It may indeed be argued that science, and biology in particular, are providing society with a powerful array of tools and problems, but with no adequate conceptual basis for relating tools to problems in practice.

A second group of biopolitical issues are more directly and specifically physiological than environmental. More personal in immediate impact, although scarcely less general in ultimate ramification, are biopolitical issues relating to individual human behavior in the use of cigarettes, tranquilizers, narcotics, and alcohol— and extending to the biochemical control of personality. Even more personal and at the same time of greater social implications are questions of human reproduction and future populations. In addition, ethics and biology become mutually involved in the political issue of public responsibility for public health and are perhaps most starkly posed in the issue of biological warfare. In few of these areas have people demonstrated a readiness to be guided by verifiable knowledge in a search for policies equal to the problems. On many matters, inadequate as our knowledge may be, our failure to make full use of what we do know is all the more regrettable.

Biopolitical problems—particularly the major ones—grow increasingly national, international, and even global in character. The continuing flow of air and water and living organisms around the world has always tended to spread biological phenomena into any receptive environment. Modern technology multiplies and accelerates these possibilities, but it also enables us to discover and to understand the processes of dispersion and interaction. Where cause and effect relationships in these processes have become clear they have sometimes influenced political behavior as, for example, when the sciences of epidemiology and plant pathology led to the establishment of quarantines at national frontiers and were among the factors leading to international cooperation in public health and agriculture. Continuing difficulty in controlling international traffic in narcotics and the tragic consequences of carelessness in international commerce in hazardous materials underscored the lesson that wherever men go there can be no biopolitical frontiers.

Old-fashioned political nationalism has become one of the principal obstacles to biological sanity. How much positive harm or deprivation may a national government lawfully inflict upon its own people and the rest of the world in pursuance of its alleged “sovereign rights”? Atmospheric testing of thermonuclear devices has posed the question dramatically, but a list of other major biopolitical issues, current and impending, could be extended to great length and in great variety. Obvious illustrations are found in national policies pertaining to the destruction of wildlife and its habitats, allocation of water from international rivers, contamination of air and water, control of plant and animal diseases, and increase in human populations and their mass migration.

The inadequacy of conventional political mechanisms to deal with the problems of the new age of biology is nowhere more apparent than in the oceans from which life may well have come and from which man is increasingly drawing sustenance. As knowledge of the influence of the oceans upon terrestrial life continues to grow, so too does apprehension concerning impairment of their life-sustaining qualities. Massive discharge of untreated biological and industrial wastes into rivers, lakes, and coastal waters has impaired or destroyed important resources of food supply and recreation; residues from oil-burning seacraft have been...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Biopolitics: Science, Ethics, and Public Policy
• 2 Social Response to Advances in the Life Sciences
• 3 Health and Homeostasis as Societal Concepts
• 4 Biological Relevance of Historical Experience
• 5 Life Sciences as Problems for Politics and Law
• 6 Biocratic Interpretations of Ethical Behavior
• 7 Biocracy and Bureaucracy: Coping with Conflict
• 8 Biotechnology: Options, Benefits, and Risks
• 9 International Consequences of Applied Biology
• 10 Biocrats and Democrats: Allies or Adversaries?