Me Medicine vs. We Medicine

Reclaiming Biotechnology for the Common Good

Donna Dickenson

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780231534413
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Ethics in Medicine

Personalized healthcare—or what the award-winning author Donna Dickenson calls "Me Medicine"—is radically transforming our longstanding "one-size-fits-all" model. Technologies such as direct-to-consumer genetic testing, pharmacogenetically developed therapies in cancer care, private umbilical cord blood banking, and neurocognitive enhancement claim to cater to an individual's specific biological character, and, in some cases, these technologies have shown powerful potential. Yet in others they have produced negligible or even negative results. Whatever is behind the rise of Me Medicine, it isn't just science. So why is Me Medicine rapidly edging out We Medicine, and how has our commitment to our collective health suffered as a result?

In her cogent, provocative analysis, Dickenson examines the economic and political factors fueling the Me Medicine phenomenon and explores how, over time, this paradigm shift in how we approach our health might damage our individual and collective well-being. Historically, the measures of "We Medicine," such as vaccination and investment in public-health infrastructure, have radically extended our life spans, and Dickenson argues we've lost sight of that truth in our enthusiasm for "Me Medicine."

Dickenson explores how personalized medicine illustrates capitalism's protean capacity for creating new products and markets where none existed before—and how this, rather than scientific plausibility, goes a long way toward explaining private umbilical cord blood banks and retail genetics. Drawing on the latest findings from leading scientists, social scientists, and political analysts, she critically examines four possible hypotheses driving our Me Medicine moment: a growing sense of threat; a wave of patient narcissism; corporate interests driving new niche markets; and the dominance of personal choice as a cultural value. She concludes with insights from political theory that emphasize a conception of the commons and the steps we can take to restore its value to modern biotechnology.

1

A REALITY CHECK FOR PERSONALIZED MEDICINE

We are in a new era of the life sciences, but in no area of research is the promise greater than in personalized medicine.

—Barack Obama, as a senator introducing the bill that became the Genomics and Personalized Medicine Act 2007

THE SOARING PROMISES MADE BY ADVOCATES OF PERSONALIZED medicine are probably loftier than those in any other medical or scientific realm today. In addition, the range of therapies covered by personalized medicine is even greater than then-Senator Obama realized. Direct-to-consumer genetic testing, personal tailored drug regimes, private umbilical cord blood banking, and “enhancement” technologies all come under that rubric. Part of this book’s own promise is to introduce you to personalized medicine’s lesser-known variants, illustrating how they all chime together in their hymns and psalms in praise of what I call “Me Medicine.”

Sometimes, the clarion calls for these new technologies are delivered with almost messianic fervor, as in the case of this paean from Francis Collins, a former codirector of the Human Genome Project:

We are on the leading edge of a true revolution in medicine, one that promises to transform the traditional “one size fits all” approach into a much more powerful strategy that considers each individual as unique and as having special characteristics that should guide an approach to staying healthy. Although the scientific details to back up these broad claims are still evolving, the outline of a dramatic paradigm shift is coming into focus.… You have to be ready to embrace this new world.¹

Do I? Why? I’d like to see more evidence before I decide. It’s not that I’m afraid of new biotechnologies—I’ve spent my working life analyzing them and their ethical implications. Nor is it because I don’t necessarily believe the promises will come true, although there are good reasons to doubt that they will ever really amount to a “dramatic paradigm shift.”

Certainly, vast sums are pouring into personalized medicine: plans to spend $416 million on a four-year plan were announced in December 2011 by the National Institutes of Health,² and interest from the private sector is also intense. But the Human Genome Project (HGP) was also very generously funded, without having so far produced correspondingly weighty results for translational medicine, even a decade after it was announced that the human genome had been fully sequenced.³ “Indeed, after 10 years of effort, geneticists are almost back to square one in knowing where to look for the roots of common disease.”⁴ Productivity in drug development actually declined after the HGP announced its completion, as did new license applications to the Food and Drug Administration.⁵

And we’ve been here before: other supposed “paradigm shifts,” including gene therapy and embryonic stem cell research, haven’t yet translated into routine clinical care either. Likewise for personalized medicine, current genetic tests and molecular diagnostics only apply to about 2 percent of the population, according to a March 2012 report from United Health’s Center for Health Reform and Modernization.⁶ A Harris poll of 2,760 patients and physicians in January and February 2012 indicated that doctors had recommended personal genetic tests for only 4 percent of their patients. This is hardly the stuff of a paradigm shift, at least not yet.⁷ Some experts call the genomic revolution merely a “myth,” arguing that at most we’re witnessing a process of incremental change, one consistent with past trends in diagnostic innovation.⁸

Yet despite the lack of substantial evidence that personalized genetic testing is actually having a huge effect, the publicity around it may well be doing so—not necessarily for the best. I’m concerned that Me Medicine is eclipsing what I call We Medicine, so that we’re losing sight of the notion that biotechnology can and should serve the common good. In my view, we would be wrong to prioritize personalized health technologies at the expense of public health measures, which have brought us comparative freedom from the ill health that plagued our ancestors. I see a pattern here—not only a similarity among all the apparently disparate forms of personalized medicine but also a familiar political formula: “private good, public bad.”

Personalized medicine consciously appeals to the idea of the individual making free choices about her health, but in a much more sophisticated way than the simplistic stereotypes about free markets in healthcare versus welfare states, which were played out to tiresome length in the debates over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act 2010. Because it’s much more palatable medicine—excuse the pun—it may not look like it’s even part of that debate at all, but it is. If we take the Me Medicine fork in the healthcare road, we can’t simultaneously go down the We Medicine route—the road less traveled by, in Robert Frost’s phrase.

For example, there’s been considerable growth in private umbilical cord blood banks, which charge a fee to store cord blood in an individual “account” for the newborn in the hope that stem cell technology will eventually allow the blood to be used as a sort of personal spare-parts kit. With one or two exceptions, these banks reserve the blood for the child’s private use (Me Medicine), but there are also public cord blood banks (We Medicine) that actually achieve better clinical results.⁹ Yet if enough parents bank their babies’ umbilical cord blood privately, there won’t be a sufficient supply for public cord blood banks, although those can be seen as both medically and ethically superior.

At the moment, perhaps surprisingly, the United States leads the world in the overall number of public cord blood banks. Despite our famous cult of individualism, we’re tops in We Medicine there, but we won’t stay that way if current trends toward private banking continue. Here and elsewhere, what may look like innocent individual consumer choices will shape how we as a society assure our health and that of future generations. So we need to think long and hard about how we want to prioritize the claims of Me and We rather than just hopping aboard the personalized medicine bandwagon like the great majority of commentators. This book is intended to let you make up your own mind about how you see those priorities, by giving you accurate, up-to-date medical and scientific evidence and locating the new technologies in their ethical and political context.

First, however: what exactly are these new personalized technologies, and how can they make such grand claims? Unlike this book, most works treat the various aspects of personalized medicine as separate developments, with different diagnoses and prognoses. The various techniques do at first look disparate. Direct-to-consumer genetic testing, in which a limited selection of genetic analyses are performed on a sample of saliva or a cheek swab, is probably the most familiar of the Me Medicine technologies. The field, which includes a number of “big players,” such as the California company 23andMe, has been widely publicized by journalists who tried “retail genetics” out for themselves.¹⁰ Along with the example of private cord blood banking, another increasingly familiar example of Me Medicine is pharmacogenetics or pharmacogenomics. Here, genetic typing is used to determine a patient’s probable response to drugs, such as cancer treatments, and to tailor the pharmaceutical regime personally. Although, as we’ve seen, the percentage of patients undergoing such genetic diagnostics and treatments is still in the low single figures, chemical or neurocognitive enhancement technologies are even further away from everyday clinical practice, although they too have provoked column inches about what one of their most prominent opponents calls “the case against perfection.”¹¹

What do all these apparently disparate technologies have in common? Essentially, they’re linked by two largely unchallenged assumptions: that “individual” is better than “social” and that we’re on the cusp of a “true revolution in medicine” to make it more individualized. But are these assumptions justified? They may or may not be—that’s what we’ll discover as we go along—but the really interesting question is why so few have challenged them. The book-stores are full of somewhat dewy-eyed and often uncritically “pro” books about personalized medicine, such as Misha Angrist’s Here Is a Human Being: At the Dawn of Personal Genomics; Francis Collins’s The Language of Life: DNA and the Revolution in Personalized Medicine; Kevin Davies’s The Thousand-Dollar Genome: The Revolution in DNA Sequencing and the New Era of Personalized Medicine; Thomas Goetz’s The Decision Tree: Taking Control of Your Health in the Era of Personalized Medicine; Eric Topol’s The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care; and Lone Frank’s My Beautiful Genome: Exploring Our Genetic Future, One Quirk at a Time. But the book you’re reading now doesn’t take a knee-jerk “anti” position; it just aims to be balanced.

We need to ask why so many multinational firms, researchers, and—yes—presidents of the United States have all bought into personalized medicine. We urgently need a disinterested and balanced critique of personalized medicine’s origins, the commercial interests that lie behind it, and the dynamics of its marketing as what I term retail therapy, that is, medical treatment and diagnostic regimes conceived as consumer goods. Just as the body itself has been commodified—the argument of my previous book, Body Shopping—so medicine is increasingly seen as a commodity, in both insurance-based and more socialized healthcare systems.

Historically, it was not Me Medicine but We Medicine—programs like public vaccination, clean water, and screening for tuberculosis—that brought us reduced infant mortality, comparative freedom from contagious disease, and an enhanced lifespan. Yet today, many of these public programs seem to be increasingly distrusted, even detested. Some U.S. campaigners against the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine have allegedly accused physicians who administer the vaccine of being in the same league as Nazi concentration camp doctors.¹² Vaccination programs are in profound trouble in many parts of the world. In India, a similar though less virulent reaction has arisen against what might seem like a model public health campaign, the vaccination of young girls against the human papillomavirus implicated in cervical cancer.¹³ In Muslim areas of northern Nigeria, a country which accounts for about 45 percent of polio cases worldwide, a World Health Organization vaccination campaign was boycotted as a Western plot to spread HIV and AIDS through adulterated injections.¹⁴

In contrast, when a new medical development combines scientific mystique and the wand-waving word “personal,” the reaction worldwide will probably be overwhelming adulation. That was very much the case when the Korean researcher Hwang Woo Suk announced in 2005 that he had successfully created eleven “patient-specific” stem cell lines. Hwang was pointing toward the possibility that eventually everyone could have a personal spare-parts kit, overcoming the problem of immune rejection when organs are transplanted.¹⁵ “After Hwang’s article was published, he turned into a sacred figure.”¹⁶ The reaction, in both East and West, was so euphoric that Hwang offered to set up a worldwide franchise of his method, with satellite laboratories in California and England—before his claim was revealed to be totally false. He hadn’t created a single successful cell line, even though he had published his “findings” in the prestigious journal Science—fooling both the editors and the scientific world at large.

But how was that possible? Although it’s a bit speculative, perhaps one reason is the spell cast by the idea of personalized therapy. Some of that unconfined joy and uncritical adulation had a genuinely scientific appeal—that is, if the technique had worked, and if it hadn’t required dangerous levels of hormonal stimulation to produce the human eggs that the technique demanded in huge quantities.¹⁷ But it also seems plausible that Hwang’s supposedly patient-specific stem cells appealed because they pushed the right buttons in our psyches: the ones marked “personal” and “individual.” The possibility of a commercial franchise mooted by Hwang before his unmasking indicates that pushing those buttons is also important and attractive to corporate interests.

It’s hard to explain why else ferreting out the truth took determined campaigning by a not-very-well-known Korean feminist group, Korean Womenlink, and the subsequent acknowledgment by Hwang’s principal colleague, Gerald Schatten, that the methods used in sourcing the eggs had been ethically dubious, eventually leading to a recognition of the scientific inaccuracy of the claim. It’s also difficult to understand why more attention wasn’t paid to improving the rate of tissue rejection through further advances in the already promising field of immunology, as a few scientists did argue at the time.¹⁸ That would mean that we could recruit a wider range of tissue donors without having to worry about tissue matching, to avoid rejection of the transplant, or the alternative of heavy and risky doses of immunosuppressants. We could concentrate on practical methods of improving the success of altruistic donation from others rather than on our own speculative personal spare-parts kits.

But that’s the dull alternative of We Medicine, isn’t it? How can it compare with the exciting promise of personalized medicine? Here’s the story of someone who did test that promise at no little risk to himself. Like Collins, he’s one of the new “evangelists” of Me Medicine. His story might help us begin to piece together the reasons why so many observers have joined that new movement. There’s also a dominant theme of threat runn...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Preface
• 1. A Reality Check for Personalized Medicine
• 2. “Your Genetic Information Should Be Controlled by You”: Personalized Genetic Testing
• 3. Pharmacogenetics: One Patient, One Drug?
• 4. “Your Birth Day Gift”: Banking Cord Blood
• 5. Enhancement Technologies: Feeling More Like Myself
• 6. “The Ancient, Useless, Dangerous, and Filthy Rite of Vaccination”: Public Health, Public Enemy?
• 7. Reclaiming Biotechnology for the Common Good
• Notes
• References
• Index