Presentation - Ruha Benjamin

Presentation - Ruha Benjamin

 

Provincializing Science: Genomic Sovereignty and the Mapping & Marketing of Ethnoracial Diversity

In this presentation, I considered the challenges and opportunities that grow out of ‘genomic sovereignty’ as an emergent science policy frame in the Global South. Unlike pan-indigenous advocacy groups that have asserted group sovereignty claims to opt-out of genomics research, these governmental policies set out proactive research agendas to stimulate health and economic gains. The biology of the population becomes a natural resource and genomics is enrolled in nation-building. First codified in Mexico as an amendment to the General Health Law (2008), a number of other countries have issued sovereignty-like policy statements or passed legislation that invests in genomics research and penalizes the export of indigenous DNA samples out of the country without prior government approval. After briefly identifying three strands in the organization of this policy arena—the International Haplotype Mapping Project as a model and foil for genomic sovereignty initiatives; public health genomics as a field which stands in contrast to Western pursuits of personalized medicine; and Big Pharma's shift away from a blockbuster model to an ethnic niche model of drug development—I suggested two interrelated challenges for proponents of this policy framework. Finally, I asked session participants to think together about what alternative forms of knowledge production and science regulation might lay between the global genome qua internationalism and the national genome qua sovereignty?