Reflections on the Tarrytown Meeting Day One

Hope: For "limits." (Francine); boundaries between e.g., transgender interventions (good) and transhumanism (bad); (Yali); for drawing lines; for a "reining in of the technology."

What Concerns Motivate that Hope?

Greed & Markets. One most often-articulated concern was about greed and desire—often expressed as a concern about markets dominating our lives. The concern was that there is no sphere of our lives free from market influences.

• Strikingly, more than one of the Gen Xers said that this is just the way their world is; their people are impatient with anything but market talk. "We sell ourselves, market ourselves all the time; selling eggs is just an extension of that."

Coercion & Exploitation. More specifically, there was the concern that the "reprogenetic" market exploits women; concern about exploitation/soft coercion of women; several suggestions of false consciousness (you say you're choosing it, but you aren't really). Carmel & Dorothy: "We thought IVF would expand women's choices, but it [constrained them]."

• Gen Xers don't buy false consciousness arguments; they're as much in control of their lives as we are of ours.

Technology. Bruce/Jonathan/Dorothy: "Power/technology uses us." Technology is not morally neutral. We need to shape it (if we are to save the planet).

• Joe et al: We use technology: People with disabilities feel like they have to fight to get the technologies. When they do get access [for example, to pre-implantation genetic diagnosis for people with achondroplasia dwarfism], they want to distinguish between selecting against homozygotes (good) and selecting against heterozygotes (bad).

• Sujatha: The technologies can deconstruct and construct; i.e., the technologies can be used to shore up conventional families—and can be used to create untraditional families. The technologies can reinforce our interest in our biological ancestors & all the garbage that can go with that—and it can problematize our understanding of ourselves as examples of pure anything at all. So, these technologies, which can reinforce old, dumb ideas about race, can also be used to disrupt those same ideas.

Issues re who "we" are

• Worried about our strange bedfellows
• Desire for a way to articulate those "symbolic" concerns about markets, exploitation, etc. without being labeled religious/conservative/giving ammunition to our enemies in the abortion war—for those of us who think those concerns can get traction.
• Awareness of us as academics vs us as advocates (of course some of us want to be both)

"Solutions"

Wider awareness of the questions (Debra Greenfield)

Balance. As Jonathan Kahn said, we aren't getting rid of markets or science. Assuming that's right, we need to achieve balance between markets and civil society; there could be a university-civil society relations like university-industrial complex (Kahn and Jasanoff)

Regulation. This is where liberals end up—perhaps not the sorts of "limits" or "boundaries" that some of us wish were possible.

Final observation:

Concern about genocentrism/geneticization & desire to see the big picture, so attend to context. Actually one small bit of good news: the science is heading us away from a focus on genes! (It would be worse than ironic if we let the old gene-focused scientific conversation direct our policy conversation.)