Researcher Talks About ‘French DNA’

Researcher Talks About ‘French DNA’
BY LIA UNRAU
Rice News Staff
March 26, 1998

A time of scientific, ethical and fiscal turmoil at a leading French laboratory
in 1994 allowed Paul Rabinow to place an anthropological eye on the culture
of French scientific enterprise.

Rabinow, professor of anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley,
spoke on campus as part of the Scientia lecture series March 17.

His talk, "French DNA or Trouble in Purgatory," taken from a book
he is writing, focused on attitudes surrounding genome mapping research at the
Centre d’Etudes du Polymorphisme Humain (CEPH).

Having beaten the more powerful Americans at being the first to produce a crude
physical map of the human genome, the French were in a position to collaborate
with Americans on commercial projects. But the collaboration was blocked: The
problem was, Rabinow said, that the CEPH was on the verge of giving away to
the Americans the most precious of things–French DNA.

Rabinow pointed to the unexpected heritage of certain aspects of Christianity
which deal with life and death. He discovered echoes of the "archaic space
of purgatory" in contemporary French experience. "Although it deals
with cutting-edge science," he said, "the cultural milieu in France
has been distinguished by a profound uneasiness about recent discoveries and
inventions. It is striking that certain imagery, vocabulary and concepts, first
articulated 700 years ago, retain or attain actuality. These concerns include
a chronic sense that the future is at stake."

In 1994, Rabinow said, 35 percent of the French and 71 percent of French Catholics
believed in purgatory. Purgatory represents a future at stake–a future of heaven
or hell.

Modern French scientists, he said, experience a strong sense of hesitancy over
the consequences of what they continue to feel as an imperative to know, and
to put that knowledge into action, especially when that knowledge and those
actions concern living beings. In part, this hesitancy arises from changing
definitions of life and death, mediated by a stream of technologies and shifting
relations of parts and wholes.

"Especially after World War II, issues of life and death, health and disease,
pathology and normality have become matters of state, and the state in all its
diversity, has become increasingly like congeries of institutions devoted to
war and welfare, or to defense and social health," Rabinow said.

These issues are going to emerge in a much more complicated way, he said, once
all human genomes are archived on a computer.

"Since 71 percent of French Catholics, and it’s probably higher here,"
Rabinow said, "know in their minds that the stakes of this are life and
death, why aren’t we getting a richer discourse on life and death from various
religious communities?" Instead, he said, there are "presidential
commissions on a nonissue like cloning." He added: "I think the ethics
part is irrelevant. We have no bioethics yet."

"I would look to the religious communities to reinvigorate the debate,"
Rabinow said.

The final lecture in the spring series will be given by Albert Van Helden,
Autrey Professor of History at Rice, at 4 p.m. on April 14 in the Kyle Morrow
Room, Fondren Library.

For related information visit the following Web site:
Scientia Lecture: www.ruf.rice.edu/~scientia/