- Jul 2024
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In contrast, acuerpar, which roughlytranslates to “giving one’s body,” engages all embodied aspects of the self incollective practices of care
This is fundamental, solidarity without practices of care loses its normative power.
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it has been reduced to disembodied expressions of empathy,as in, “I feel your pain.”
This is the main problem of solidarity, its use as a superficial form of empathy at best
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- Nov 2023
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In Farrier’s idea of relationality,as conceptualised in his work on the sacrifice zones, the human arguablyremains an undifferentiated entity; a universal ‘us’ or ‘we’ that suddenlyfinds itself becoming a geologic actor.
which is an idea that's deep within the concept of the Antropocene
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Yet in both cases, the human itself is often notsufficiently differentiated and remains an oversimplified, quasi-universalbeing. In this way, the conceptualisation of capitalist modernity as a projectthat silences nonhuman others (their temporality and their materiality) disre-gards, and unwillingly ghosts, the racial and colonial dimensions of the devel-opment of modern capitalism and their reverberations in the present.
Thesis
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want to argue that the focus on these spectres ofrelationality or enmeshment, which currently pervades research on theAnthropocene and its imaginaries, actually reproduces particular aspects ofcapitalist modernity.
Thesis
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However, from my perspective, and incontrast to Bauman, a disposable life is not necessarily a redundant one. Thoseworkers whose lives are disposable are usually indeed very necessary (theurban economy does not exist without their sweat and poorly paid labour),even if only as a whole or in general, and not as specific individuals orgroups. In other words: they correspond to lives that can be massivelysacrificed, as from an economic (capitalist) viewpoint, there is always plentyof similar lives to replace those human beings who become ‘useless’ orperish as a result of disease, injuries or death.
this is kind of the difference in Marx between use labor and labor power, the specific use of labor in a very particular taks, versus the unspecified form of labor
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- Jan 2023
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It is thatperdurance, and not inheritance, is the sine qua non of evolu-tion. It lies not in the transmission, from one generation to thenext, of an already constructed world but in the continualbringing forth or production of a world that—in the passage ofgenerations—is ever in formation.
Main conclusion of first thesis
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- Dec 2022
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functionality
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- Feb 2022
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www.anthropology-news.org www.anthropology-news.org
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This layered credit to Vespucci, designating America as a “no-place” territory, would prove useful for those set on effacing the lives and cultures of people inhabiting the land, and also of those brought from Africa to economically develop the territories for profit.
This resonates with the long tradition of colonial powers to designate indigenous lands as empty. E.g. la conquista del desierto in Argentina
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- Mar 2021
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www.frontiersin.org www.frontiersin.org
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Nice review of network-based studies on neurodegenerative diseases. It shows the main findings of studies using network-based approaches. However, it does not generate a particular perspective on the main problems to solve, future directions (beyond more network-based studies and experimental validation), methodological issues or competing perspectives, etc
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www.sciencedirect.com www.sciencedirect.com
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Good overall review on sex differences in AD. However, it lacks a more broader perspective and an explicit intention to join together these diverse studies. It's more of a compendium of sex difference studies on AD. Good for referencing literature, but not so good to get a clear perspective on where the field is at. What's clear about the review is that there is a lack of multi-omics research exploring the sex differences in AD.
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This study also showed that machine learning predictive models performed better with female only data, suggesting molecular changes in females might better model AD-related changes than those in males.
Not necessarily a good conclusion from those results
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Besides sex hormones, many female-specific pathways have been identified to contribute AD susceptibilities. A cross-tissue meta-analysis revealed a female-specific immune signature in both brain and blood (55)
This citation is (or was) a preprint at the moment of publication
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- Jan 2021
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- Sep 2020
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science.sciencemag.org science.sciencemag.org
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Future studies that include samples from males and females will now need to account for cell type composition in addition to sex chromosome complement and hormonal environment. This is because different sex ratios in cell type in cases versus controls may drive the gene expression signal more than the phenotype of interest.
This is relevant when considering sex differences and not accounting for differential cell proportions
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- Jul 2020
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Araya-Carrión realiza su propia extracción, pero esta no pretende la reinserción a-histórica y fetichista del aserrín en la circulación económica.
que tipos de circulaciones no capitalista son posibles? y como se ven?
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El jardín de la extracción capitalista se constru-ye mediante tecnologías de exterminio que acaban con la bio-diversidad natural y, por lo tanto, con la potencialidad actuante de la materia.
Creo que la "potencialidad actuante de la materia" no se ve disminuida por el capitalismo, es mas, la agencialidad del cumulo de aserrin atesta a lo contrario. De la misma forma, podemos ver en esta materia impuesta por el neoliberalismo, un agente tambien. Como en el caso del matsutake, del libro the Anna Tsing, The mushroom at the end of the world
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La intervención nos propone recorrer diversos tiempos (el ahora y el antes, los tiempos de la colonización, la opresión, la tortura y el exterminio, pero también distintos tiem-pos de resistencia colectiva) y diversos espacios (el aquí y el allá, el centro y la periferia, Neltume y Santiago).
Es similar a los documentales de patricio guzman, particularmente el boton de nacar, en donde se conecta el exterminio colonizador y el exterminio de la dictadura
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Estas dos topologías dependen, a su vez, de dos perspectivas: la visión “desde abajo” ve en el pasado una consecu-ción de acontecimientos y la historia como una línea o una cadena que avanza hacia delante; la visión desde arriba es la perspectiva del ángel, quien intentando resistir la tempestad también lineal del progreso, logra ver el pasado como un cúmulo, como una colección de estratos de ruina sobre ruina.
dos visiones de la historia
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atlasiv.com atlasiv.com
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En esa transgresión aparece la violencia acumulada. El aserrín es el amontonamiento de violencias históricas que se mantienen vigentes hasta el día de hoy en Neltume.
El aserrin es la ruina dejada del capitalismo colonial
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La lamngen en la fotografía demarca el recorrido de su rol como dispositivo testimonial, borrando su figura individual para invocar en su pluralidad una compleja red de posibilidades de testimonios e historia ancestral.
el otro, en este sentido, es siempre representante de algo (mujer mapuche) en vez de ser reconocida en su individualidad (nombre propio)
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el aserrín
sera en este caso el aserrin un residuo del capitalismo? Sera una ruina del mismo?
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- Jun 2020
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cuny547-my.sharepoint.com cuny547-my.sharepoint.com
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A word deployed in academe to curb racialist denotations is often used today inside and outside of academe with racialist con-notations. A word intended to promote pluralism often becomes a trope in con-servative agendas or in late liberal versions of the civilizing project.
This is a fundamental aspect of the historical development of the concept of culture. As seen, for example, in racist statements from physicians in the book Reproducing Race, where they ascribe differential treatment of patients by means of different cultures. It is also the idea of "racism without races" of Etienne Balibar
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- Nov 2019
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Steven Pinker (2011)
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However our love of life or biophilia, which leads us to treat animalsdecently and take care of our environment, shows that we can be caring to otherspecies.
Is this true? There is an underlying and implicit assumption about human nature here, and elsewhere in the text
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biological evolution
There is a mistake in equating biological evolution with a particular mechanism, natural selection
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Archeological excavations allow estimates of violence when they unearthbodies with smashed or decapitated heads, spearheads embedded in bones, andprojectiles inside rib cages (Pinker2011).
Is the only source for pre-historical warfare the book of Steven Pinker?
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he net effect has been a reduction in prejudice.
How to explain the rise of authoritarianism, white supremacy, and Neo-fasicst groups?
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Modern society further expanded the size of the in-group
a clear and problematic reliance on the idea (mainly from phsycology) that human history can be understood has an in-group out-group conflict
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Forthe greatest part of human history, biological factors controlled moral sentimentsand the overriding goal was to protect one’s family.
Is this true?
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In a similar vein, Alexander Wendt (2003) tracespolitical organization from states through five increasingly encompassing stages:systems of states, societies of states, world society, collective security, and worldstate. Each stage remedies the flaws in the stage that precedes it.
an even clear approximation to a commitment to understand history, or evolution, as progress
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As James Grier Miller (1977) explained years ago, since lifeformed on Earth 3.7 billion years ago, there has been a steady progression in thedirection of larger biological and social entities: cell, organ, individual, group,organization, community, society, and organizations of societies.
A very clear conception that history has been the history of progress
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This way the notion of autonomization has a precise meaning: it is the introduction of new layers of ontological – both logical and historical – mediation between social forms and their material bases.
definition of autonomization
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While neoliberalism has varied in its manifestations in different countries and regu-latory arenas, the common core has been the promotion of market-based solutions to a broad range of issues.
brief definition of neoliberalism
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Such processes of collectivization are also a corollary of the increasinglyrespectable, mainstream ethical understanding that biomedical research isexplicitly a process of resource extraction and value production.
Benefit-sharing emerges therefore, as a response to the fact that biomedical research actually produces value from the extraction of resources
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In other words, and in a process equally visible in the annals of bio-prospecting, ‘groups’ are not necessarily the precondition but rather theresult of efforts to obtain collective consent.
This is not only evident here, but also from inclusionary policies whose aim is to add more diversity to studies of human genetics; an important caveat is therefore, that those groups to be included are at the same time generated through those procedures
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. Many benefit-sharing proposals inclinical research, as with bioprospecting, operate comfortably in the idiomof intellectual property – valuing contributions to innovation, and reward-ing participation in the Lockean project of adding labor to nature. But theyroutinely and definitively stop short of offering property rights as a kind ofbenefit itself.
The limit is ownership
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the foundationalprohibition against ‘undue inducement’ – luring people, however indirectly,to participate in research by offering direct returns on their involvemen
But a difference between both cases (reimbursement and benefit-sharing) is the certainty and uncertainty of the benefit
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This decision famously drew on and thus reaf-firmed the long-prevailing biomedical consensus that research is, funda-mentally, for the ‘good of humanity’ and that participation must continueto be rendered as an act of gift-giving or donation, with no basis for a directclaim for ‘getting back’
a fundamental contradiction of modern bio-sciences
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reserves.library.emory.edu reserves.library.emory.edu
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One of the peculiarities of capitalism is that it treats its struc-turing social relations as if they were ‘economic’. In fact, we quickly found it necessary to talk about the ‘non-economic’ background conditions that enabled such an ‘economic system’ to exist. These are features not of a capitalist economy, but of a capitalist society;
Capitalism is more than an economic system
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An economic system defined by private property, the accumulation of self-expanding value, markets in free labour and in other major inputs to commodity production, and by the market allocation of social surplus
summary of main argument
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But it turned out that there was a whole back-story about where capital itself comes from—a rather violent story of dispossession and expropriation. Moreover, as David Harvey has stressed, this back-story is not located only in the past, at the ‘origins’ of capitalism
primitive accumulation still occurs in contemporary times
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In a capitalist society, he says, capital itself becomes the Subject. Human beings are its pawns, reduced to figuring out how they can get what they need in the interstices, by feeding the beast
In this sense, humans work for the economy, and not the economy works for humans
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systemic thrust or directionality: namely, the accumulation of capita
Third defining feature of capitalism
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This leads directly to Marx’s second core feature, the free labour market, because the others—that is, the vast majority—now have to go through a very peculiar song and dance, in order to work and get what they need to continue living and to raise their children.
Second defining feature of capitalism
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defining feature of capitalism is private property in the means of production, which presupposes a class division between the owners and the producers.
First defining feature of capitalism
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In general, then, we lack conceptions of capitalism and capitalist crisis that are adequate to our time
main problem
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The upshot is that we are living through a capitalist crisis of great sever-ity without a critical theory that could adequately clarify it.
Because of the lack of capitalism talk among new activists and the inability to incorporate feminism, ecology, and postcolonial theories in the older anti-capitalists
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www.versobooks.com www.versobooks.com
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From 1990 to 2010, a centre-left coalition called Concertación – including the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, and the Christian Democratic Party
The Communist Party was not part of the Concertacion, but it was part of the New Majority (2014-2018)
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He hypothesizes that this is because‘the value’derived fromliteral extraction‘is so out of proportion to the effort; in some sense, we recog-nize that the value was“already there”–stumbled upon, not created...fromlabor’, but emerging‘fabulously, almost magically, as if from nowhere’(Fergu-son 2015, p. 184).
This is important to understand how the extraction of human data (from DNA to browsing history) might seem so obscene in the public eye, compared to other forms of extraction,
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In many instances of capitalistvalorization and accumulation, profit takes more and more the shape of‘rent’, precisely due to its reliance on resources that are not intrinsic to capital’sturnover (Vercellone2013)
The reliance on rent might not be also a response to economic crises?
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Nevertheless when we are attentiveto the continuities and ruptures that characterize the relations between literalextraction and extraction in the expanded sense, it becomes possible toattend to the prevalence and strategic role of extractive operations in contem-porary capitalism
The importance of the continuity of different forms of extractivism
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Neoliberalism is a massive expansion of economic rationality and thinking, to the point where economic calculation, maximum benefit for minimum cost, becomes the very definition of rationality.
neoliberalism not only explains economics, but human nature
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- Oct 2019
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Questions of value then seem largely reactive, even futile.
Yes, they are framed in terms of 'what are the consequences of something'
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But the discussion still focused on predictions about what genome editing will be able to do in the near term and what its biological risks are, even though it raises issues that clearly transcend immedi-ate concerns for health and safety.
a short-sighted perspective
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- Aug 2019
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Patent ownership rights benefitsome women and their families, but not others. Patentable subject matter derivedfrom human bodily tissues and plant knowledge are extracted from the bodiesand minds of some women, while other women become the beneficiaries of suchacts of corporeal and incorporeal appropriation leading to patented medical tech-nologies.
Main ethical issue
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Women therefore are performing novel forms of labor within newcircuits ofbiocapital. In addition, women are primarily responsible for utilizingtechnological medical inventions to care for themselves and their families.
women are not only fundamental loci for exploitation, but also for their role as consumers
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A generic Ponzi scheme refers to any investment opportunity thatdangles the promise of outsized profits through the hidden mechanism of payingdividends to early investors with money deposited by later investors.
definition of Ponzi scheme
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First, we could explore the growing prevalence of private and/or com -mercial sources and mechanisms of funding within scientific research. Second, we could explore the growing emphasis placed upon a generic, abstract ‘science’(or ‘knowledge’ or even ‘information’) within influential policy and businesscircles as the source of economic growth and competitiveness, via ‘innovation’.
Ways to measure the privatization and commercialization of science
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- Jul 2019
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The privatization ofuniversal labor is an answer to problems of accumulation. But it causesnew contradictions as other attempts to counteract capitalist crises havedone.
good insight: the increase of intellectual property right as a response to capital problem, which engender new contradictions within the system
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But the problem lies in the fact thatinformation and technology once produced are usually quite simple to re-produce, and therefore the realization of the exchange value is questioned.Only the artificial creation of a monopoly in the form of intellectual prop-erty titles allows information to be traded and the desired exchange valueto be obtained.
How IP solves the problem of the simplicity knowledge's reproduction
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monopoly, absolute rentand two forms of differential rents.
Forms of rent
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Generally, a rent can bedefined as an income which is enforced by the owner of a property title,even if he/she stands outside production.
Definition of rent
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irst, the separation of pro-ducers from their means of production, enclosures and the enforcement ofnew property rights in the sense of the original accumulation; second, theexpansion of capitalist property into new areas (e.g. colonial appropriation,privatizations); and third, dispossessions by stronger accumulation centers(e.g. large companies).
forms of accumulation by dispossession
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Thus, the orig-inal accumulation is not to be understood as a historical phase, but as apermanent characteristic of capital.
A key aspect of original accumulation, is that isn't an historical phase but a phenomenon of current capitalism
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Luxemburg (1913: 397) impressively pointed out theviolent accumulation of capital at the expense of non-capitalist productionforms.
Book here.
The particular chapter is this one
"The other aspect of the accumulation of capital concerns the relations between capitalism and the non-capitalist modes of production which start making their appearance on the international stage. Its predominant methods are colonial policy, an international loan system – a policy of spheres of interest – and war. Force, fraud, oppression, looting are openly displayed without any attempt at concealment, and it requires an effort to discover within this tangle of political violence and contests of power the stern laws of the economic process."
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Thus, anew phase of capitalism was initiated which, due to general wage pressure,the bursting of ‘rigid labor markets’ and new forms of labor organization,enabled an increase in profit rates compared to the situation in the 1970s.
post 70s boom
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This financial capital can be defined as concentrated capital in the formof money whose owners expect a revenue (interests, dividends) based onownership and/or a yield from selling the property or creditor title.
Definition of financial capital
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The aim of this article is to theoretically explain that in additionto ‘normal’ accumulation, different forms of dispossession processesand value transfers are central characteristics of the current configura-tion of capitalism.
Main purpose
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1) Although race and gender have occupied much scholarly and media attention, matriarchy, specifically black matriarchy, as both a racial and gender construct of otherness, has remained under-analyzed but yet routinely deployed in the social sciences, politics, and humanities; 2) Underlining patriarchal gift economies of exchange, bioethical matriarchy (or the bioethical matriarch) marks racialized and gendered forms of exchange arising from the absence of consent or of obligational precedents for reciprocation.
Main arguments
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Specifically, how might transcending nature–society dualisms inform a normative left political economy that includes a green or environmental critique of capitalism, one in which socionatural relations are seen to be constitutive of what we mean by capitalism and what we mean by capitalist society as well as our critiques of these (Moore, 2011)?
Main purpose of the paper
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Their Marxist appropriation thusvacillates between two alternatives: the surrogates are clinical laborers enti-tled to wages and labor protections, or they are capitalist rentiers contract-ing out their (re)productive biology in the global fertility market
The contradiction of Cooper and Waldby's book
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Biological materiality assumes, in this analysis, a capacity for autono-mous value production.
This is the idea that biological substances have latent value, irrespective of the labour applied to them
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www.newcriticals.com www.newcriticals.com
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Primitive accumulation is a powerful idea and undoubtedly captures something crucial about the functioning of global capitalism. However, it has also limitations in the contemporary context. It implies that there is an “external nature”, an outside to the circuits of capitalist valorization that can be discovered, plundered and expropriated for free.
There is no 'outside' nature, nature, in a way, is always created through circuits of capital, and those circuit bring value to those substances
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Rather, we argue that the emergence and growth of open science has not necessarily or fundamentally al-tered the dynamic of the political economy of research and innovation, primarily because this shift away from private property rights has not displaced the political-economic valuation of research in terms of returns on in-vestment (derived from monopoly rents)
But is not clear how alternative models of research valuation might upset neoliberal science
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Consequently, we want to stress that neoliberalism is better character-ized as a shift towards rentiershiprather than entrepreneurship, in that the life sciences – the epitome of an imagined hi-tech future – is not driven by the (risky) development of new products and processes, but rather by the (ongoing and far less risky) reconfiguration of property rights and ownership to turn knowledge into an asset (Zeller, 2008; Birch and Tyfield, 2013; Birch, 2017c, 2017d).
From neoliberalism understood as entrepreneurship to rentiership
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The growing and accelerating demands upon research and innovation ends up in a destructive feedback loop because neoliberalism simultaneously trans-forms the processes, institutions and relations of research and innovation in ways that systemically reduce their fecundity for system renovation (e.g., enclosing knowledge behind IP rights that limit its use).
A fundamental contradiction of the neoliberalization of science
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We can thus identify quite directly from the nature of neoliberalism as a system its tendency to systemic crisis and permanent, and likely deepening, need for wholesale system renovation – that is, the re-setting of the socio-technical system such that it can accommo-date (politically, culturally, ecologically) yet more, greater and faster (supposed) entrepreneurship.
Bust and boom cycles
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Moreover, this work in economics goes beyond its analytical pur-pose, representing a key knowledge-power technology in the legitimation of neoliberalism (Tyfield, 2016).
Foucault knowledge-power axis in here
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We define neoliberalism as a political-economic system built on epistemic market fundamentalism. Here the market is conceptualized as not only the best of all possible mechanisms for economic allocation, but, far more radically, as the best of all possible mechanisms for decision-making and, hence, knowledge production
Definition of neoliberalism
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we focus on the specific and interactive dynamics of both research and innovation andne-oliberalism in order to understand the reproduction of neoliberalism as a political-economic system, and its potential disruption via new, emergent socio-technical systems.
Purpose of chapter
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a resource that is controlled by the entity as a result of past events (forexample, purchase or self-creation) and from which future economic benefits(inflows of cash or other assets) are expecte
Definition of asset
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conceptualize assetization as aprocess in which value is constituted by the management of value andvaluation, especially as they relate to organizational entities and theircapacities.
Definition of assetization
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he presentvalue of a [discounted] future stream of earnings
Definition of capitalization
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My aim in this article is to understand the seeming contradiction betweenhigh and rising financial valuations in the life sciences sector and its con-tinuing failure to deliver on the promise of bountiful new products andservices
Main question
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The Guardian, August 29, 2011
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However, such assetmarkets have a ‘‘Ponzi-like character’’ according to Harvey (2010, 21), inthat the purchase of assets drives up their value leading to further invest-ment creating an asset bubble that eventually bursts, as evident in the recentand ongoing financial crisis.
Difference in commodity markets and asset markets
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It is only through the circulation ofcapital that rent can be extracted; it is only through the extraction of (poten-tial) rent that scarce (and fictitious) assets produce value; and it is onlythrough the creation of legal or technological monopolies that such assets canbe created
These are the fundamental aspects of the bioeconomy
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Commodities, be they ‘‘bio-commodities’’ (i.e., fragments of vitality) ornormal commodities, are products of a labor process. Value isrealizedthrough market exchange, but it is constituted by production
Marx's LTV
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First,there is an issue with how these concepts—particularly those marshaledby Waldby and Rose—link ‘‘vitality’’ and value. Second, there is an issuewith how they conceptualize value as a dual concept comprising (broadlyspeaking) ethical and economic value. Third, there is an issue with the the-orizing of financial speculation, especially in relation to the production ofsurplus value from biological resources. Finally, there is a general issuewith the appropriation of Marxist terminology (e.g., surplus, capital, value,etc.) in that these concepts are selectively adopted without adequatelyaddressing their original formulations in the LTV.
Main critiques of the authors
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This involves highlighting three key processes: first, a shiftin value creation from productive to immaterial labor; second, the emer-gence of a financialized-rentier regime of accumulation; and third, theshift from commodity-based to anasset-based market exchange
Second main purpose
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In particular, we want to highlightthe need to consider the importanceof asset-based economic processes (e.g., property, rent, etc.) in anyunderstanding of the bioeconomy. Theseasset-based processes contrastmarkedly withcommodity-based processes (e.g., production, labor, etc.)that characterize the Marxist language and concepts on which STStheorists draw
Main purpose of the paper
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The first is a political–economic, and Marxist, use of thetermvalueto refer to economic or market practices (e.g., profit and share-holder value), while the other is a more ethical framing of the term value,which could perhaps (like Waldby above) more distinctively be termedval-ues(e.g., ethics, meanings)
This is the conflation of profit with ethics in the term value that Waldby and Rose deploy
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On one hand, biovalue is ‘‘trans-lated’’ into health (2002, 317); on the other hand, and slightly contradic-tory, biovalue is the ‘‘yield’’ of vitality or health (ibid., 310).
Main contradiction of Waldby's concept of biovalue
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In recent work, I have suggested that the sentiment of many biotech boosters has themimaginingB0already to be latent inB—to believe that biological process itself alreadyconstitutes a form of surplus value and profit production (Helmreich, 2007)
This is a fundamental critique, C must be somewhere, and it must be something
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but one of the more generalclaims of the present essay will be that biological potency as such, in biocommerce, isoften (mis)taken to be a primordial ontology upon which biocapitalism merely elaborates
A fundamental thesis, the author is stating that usually there is a misrecognition that biocapitalism only taps on latent values of biological tissues
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Bioeconomy appears to be an emergent, present, but also promissory economic regime built on the exploitation of old and new biological resources.
This reflects the lack of consistency of the term; is it already here? will be a thing of the future?
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- May 2019
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“You could say, ‘I don’t want any commercial companies to have access to my data.’ The problem is that they are partnering all over the place. So maybe Children’s Hospital from Town Y accesses your data, and that’s OK with you, but their partner is Pfizer.”
This a structural problem about the intimate relation between companies and public institutions
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There’s definitely an upside to making your genome available to researchers, say Briscoe and Gray: If your DNA isn’t included, it can’t be part of what the researchers discover. But there’s a dark side, as well.
This is the balance between participate in research to gain more knowledge about your own medical conditions, and the potential for that knowledge to become the profit of someone else
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- Apr 2019
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useful work for human beings.
It is important to note the association between use value not only embedded in objective aspects (like the common sense definition of usefulness might be), but also the symbolic aspect (e.g. storing blood for the potential future use of some unknown biomarker at that point)
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the minor peak and fat tails of isonymic distancecurves will become faint
Why not show it?
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In this article, we adjust the parameterγto get eight communitiesfor all network community detection
Why only 8 communities, why not letting the number of communities as the question to be answered?
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In contrast to the clustering result derived from k-means cluster-ing (see Figure S4 in Supporting Information), the eight communityallocations derived from MMST network (see Figure 5) are not onlyclear and intuitive but also sensible and reasonable
But how to validate the clustering based on "sensible and reasonable" arguments only? Isn't there another way to assess whether the clustering is reasonable?
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Of particular importance here is Yann Moulier Boutang’s work (1998) on the historyof slave labour and its relationship to what Marx (1867) termed primitive accumulation, apre-capitalist mode of often violent primary resource acquisition (land, mineral wealth,forests, etc.) which both gives capital its resource base and dispossesses traditionalguardians, thus creating a free labour force.
fundamental component on how clinical labour mimics forms of primitive accumulation and dispossession
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oxfordre.com oxfordre.com
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This ranges from the strategic marketing of individual choice and regimes of appraisal through which individual choice is promoted and expanded to aspects of government historically subject to more overt forms of government regulation.
for example with the emergence of lifestyle as a loci of health promotion
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In this sense, governmentality and biopolitics can be read as a culmination of Foucault's thought, and an exposure of the complexity and resilience of sovereign power and its close relationship with biopower, sometimes termed by Foucault as political theory's failure to “cut off the king's head,” or displacing the role of sovereignty in dominant ontologies of the political.
Different from other interpretations, in this reading, Foucault's work show a continuum of preoccupation of similar topics
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Governmentality and biopolitics speak both of the construction and articulation of “population,” and to the management of said population.
it is fundamental how a concept of 'population' pave the way to governmentality and biopolitics
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- Mar 2019
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To identifySDE we used the NOISeqBIO method [31, 32] to com-pare gene expression in the common tissues betweenmen and women.
Method used to estimate differential expression
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First, it is often stated that sex-biased expression underlies phenotypic sexual dimorphism, and it remains unclear what proportion of sex-biased genes are relevant at the phenotypic level. Second, many assume that sex-biased genes represent resolved sexual conflict over optimal expression, as it is this resolution that permits transcriptional, and therefore pheno-typic, sexual dimorphism. Finally, we often search for the footprint of sexual selection in the sequence and expression characteristics of sex-biased genes, assuming that we can find it there.
Main problems and assumptions
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And yet, sexual dimorphism is in many ways a form of polyphenism, or even just an extreme form of phenotypic plasticity, and the study of sexual dimorphism has implications for a broad array of intra-specific variation.
Due to the sharing of the same genome
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This means that we often must assume that genes expressed differently between phenotypes are related to, and perhaps even responsible for, these complex phenotypic differences.
First assumption
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- Feb 2019
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“Relational autonomy” is the label that has beengiven to an alternative conception of what it means to be a free,self-governing agent who is also socially constituted and whopossibly defines her basic valuecommitments in terms of inter-personal relations and mutual dependencies.
Main definition of relational autonomy
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communemag.com communemag.com
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For many, the ordinary is a disaster.
This is a fundamental thesis. In other words, how the "state of exception" becomes commonplace
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- Jan 2019
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ends up negating the persistent role played by violence in the neoliberal regimes of the biopolitical and the bioeconomic (Bazzicalupo 2006a; Mbembe 2003), and that celebrates the sovereignty of a given model of the individual (specifically the liberal individual), simulta-neously refusing to consider the continuing reproduction—as the material condition of this sovereignty itself—of other “forms of life,” other models of subjectivity, in which the distinction between consent and coercion is far from invisible (see Papadopolous and Stephenson 2006; esp. 10).
Main critique to the idea of governmentality as a soft or pastoral mode of power, but rather forms of governmentality are violently installed in our neoliberal times
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PB instructs them to choose, out of these possiblefuture children, the one who is likely to be the mostadvantaged. And this means that, on our account ofdisability, parentsdohave reasons not to have a futurechild who is likely to be disabled if they have the optionof choosing another who is expected to have less or nodisability
But this conclusion doesn't follow from the premises, which is due to a lack of a clear theory of well-being. What if our theory places a greater importance for well-being in family ties; therefore, having a deaf child, within a deaf family might actually entail a greater connection among family members, which will lead to a better life than a child with no deafness raised in the same family
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This is a question for the theory of well-being.
However, a theory of well-being is clearly needed. What if a theory of well-being poses that genetic endowments have no bearing on future well-being?
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PB instructs women toseriously consider IVF if natural reproduction is likely tolead to a child with a condition that is expected to reducewell-being significantly, even if that condition is not adisease.
But isn't the PB also instructing in all cases the selection of embryos whenever the parents have the necessary means? Because between the decision of having a child of uncertain genetic quality, and one with a certain genetic quality, PB will always select the second choice
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They include the welfare of the parents, of existing chil-dren, and of others, possible harm to others, and othermoral constraints.
Other reasons that might trump the PB. But among these reasons, we should also add Sandel's argument; what will happen to the parents in this process? will they change sufficiently to change their parenting behavior as well, making them less good parents?
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These are the familiarand morally admirable attitudes of many prospectiveparents. And they are entirely compatible with later cher-ishing and loving one’s children – once these have comeinto existence.
However, (and this is probably also true in Sandel's argument as well) there is no theory of parenting; what does it mean to be a parent? what attitudes and motivations are behind a virtuous parent?
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If couples (or single reproducers) have decided tohave a child, and selection is possible, then they havea significant moral reason to select the child, of thepossible children they could have, whose life can beexpected, in light of the relevant available informa-tion, to go best or at least not worse than any of theothers.
Definition of the Procreative Beneficence (PB) Principle
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it contrasts a neutralist with a normative account of gender-specifi c disease
Main purpose of chapter
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even if the correlation between causal factors (X1) and disease (Y) appears genuine, it may not indicate a causal relation if X1 and Y have a common cause (X) or if X1 is a concomitant factor to X in causing Y. I
correlation is not causation
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It is an objective, value-neutral biological entity open to scientifi c investigation using an empirical or positivist methodology
Definition of disease
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Because there are limits to both a naturalist and nominalist understanding of gender-specifi c disease, the chapter argues in favor of what I call a methodological naturalist account of gender-specifi c disease
Her position on the nature of gender-specific disease
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This chapter explores how gender-specifi c disease provides a descriptive account of human biological dysfunction that diff ers between the genders.
Purpose of chapter
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The project argues that gender-specifi c disease and related bioethical discourses are philosophically integrative. Gender-specifi c disease is integrative because the descriptive roles of gender, dis-ease, and their relation are inextricably tied to their prescriptive roles
One of the main concepts of the work, the integrative aspect of GSM: disease are discovered but at the same time they are created as well
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As de Beauvoir famously said, “[o]ne is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the fi gure that the human female presents in societ
A way out of the sex-gender divide
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Butler cautioned that the feminist distinction between sex and gender retains a binarism of stable categorical complementarity
Problem of the gender-sex divide
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According to feminist philosopher Iris Marion Young (2005), the sex-gender distinction gained notoriety in the mid-twentieth century with the rise of second-wave feminism
Historical emergence of the sex-gender divide
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In contrast, “gender” is typically used by clinicians to refer “to the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women” (World Health Organi-zation 2010).
Definition of gender
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Typically in medicine, “sex” is a term used by clinicians to refer to the biological and physiological features that defi ne what it means to be “female” and “male”
Definition of sex
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In 1997, the physician, cardiologist, and researcher Mari-anne J. Legato founded the Partnership for Women’s Health (2007) at Columbia University in New York City, New York.
What follows are the main institutional developments of gender-specific medicine
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One might note that the defi nitions above share the view that gen-der-specifi c medicine attends to how “normal” biological “function” or biology “diff ers” between the “genders” in the “same” disease, thus high-lighting key claims in our understanding of gender-specifi c disease.
Principal claims of GSM
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It attends to the meaning of “normal” and “function” and asks whether a biomedical understanding of such notions can adequately account for what is being addressed and treated in gen-der-specifi c disease. It considers the challenge of determining “diff erence” between women and men, and females and males, and asks whether these diff erences based on biomedical criteria are suffi cient to account for what is being investigated. It explores how “gender” and “disease” are under-stood in gender-specifi c medicine and how gender is understood as a causal “variable” in disease expression and treatment.
Main points addressed in the book
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Is gender-specifi c disease discovered or created? Is it simply a function of disclosing the diff erence that chromosomes make in disease expression or is it a trendy classifi cation created in order to address past failures to study diseases that aff ect women in unique ways and to advocate for alternative ways? Is gender-specifi c disease value-neutral or value-ladened? Is it simply a “fact” disclosed by clinical scientists or is it an “evaluation” of biomedical dysfunction by clinicians and patients? Is gender-specifi c disease local or global in its reach? Is it a clinical category that makes sense only in particular contexts or one that transcends local knowledge communities that can be used in the service of global medicine? Whereas these questions paint a simplistic picture of the options, we are left with important questions: What is gender-specifi c disease? How do we know it? What role, if any, do values play in the clinical category?
Main ethical challenges
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We performed parallel ChIP-seq experi-ments on craniofacial tissues obtained from 17 individualhuman embryos spanning a critical window for the formationof the human orofacial apparatus (Figure 1A)
Samples
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To identify regulatory sequences important for human cranio-facial development, we utilized ChIP-seq of six post-transla-tional histone modifications across multiple stages and multiplebiological replicates of early human craniofacial development.
What was done
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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The only way I can get access to that data is if I give my bone to David or Johannes and wait until they process it — and bury me in the list of contributors to their paper.”
powerful picture of scientific politics
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The idea, he writes in his book, “was to make ancient DNA industrial — to build an American-style genomics factory” that would liberate such fields as archaeology, history and anthropology from hitherto insoluble debates.
A lot of different imaginaries coming out in here
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Vanuatu is a volcanic archipelago of more than 80 islands littered in an extended slingshot shape across an 800-mile arc of the South Pacific.
Map: https://goo.gl/maps/q2j9AJCDiYR2
<iframe src="https://www.google.com/maps/embed?pb=!1m18!1m12!1m3!1d62307101.16712554!2d147.43576104871053!3d-10.957846275445043!2m3!1f0!2f0!3f0!3m2!1i1024!2i768!4f13.1!3m3!1m2!1s0x6e89605ec8926013%3A0x348339cfbed0266a!2sVanuatu!5e0!3m2!1sen!2sus!4v1547750858672" width="400" height="300" frameborder="0" style="border:0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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“everywhere researchers look for differences between men and women, they find them
It is also the problem of a self-fulfilling prophecy, given the current bias in research output for significant (in the statistical way) findings
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The giftedness of nature, he points out, ‘also includes smallpox and malaria, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, decline and decay
Kass relates gift with those from nature. Are there not other gifts from life, who are not 'natural'?
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As it is commonly framed, the question is whether a particular kind of enhancement, e.g., memory enhancement or the extension of human life span, will really benefit those who are subjected to it. Would they really be better off than we are now?
The general framing for enhancement discussions
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human enhancement (particularly, but not exclusively, genetic enhancement) should be avoided because it is dangerous, and it is dangerous because, or insofar as, it represents hyperagency, that is the aspiration to remake nature in such a way that it serves our purposes and satisfies our desires (even more than it already does), or, in short, the drive to mastery.
Main argument against enhancement
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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Those confident of good health and long life would opt out of the pool, causing other people's premiums to skyrocket.
Which is what happens in some places. Different types of insurance for people with different means
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This would transform three key features of our moral landscape: humility, responsibility, and solidarity.
But it also doesn't recognize the social character of our abilities (teachers, classmates, etc)
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But we also admire players like Joe DiMaggio, who display natural gifts with grace and effortlessness.
But we also we admire the group efforts, the capability to achieve greatness through a collective endeavor
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Some who worry about the ethics of cognitive enhancement point to the danger of creating two classes of human beings: those with access to enhancement technologies, and those who must make do with their natural capacities.
But what is the ethical problem if those enhancements were affordable to everyone?
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Some say cloning is wrong because it violates the right to autonomy: by choosing a child's genetic makeup in advance, parents deny the child's right to an open future.
But this presupposes the idea that everything that we need to know about someone, as a human being, is their genetic makeup. It also assumes that identity is related to genetics.
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Brent arguesthat ‘the underlying logic used to make inferencesfrom genomic data [is] in a primitive state charac-teristic of an observational stage of science’
This point to the idea of GWAS as a hypothesis-free approach. The only hypothesis is the relation phenotype-genotype
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ethical ramifications of widely accessible tools for altering genomes.
Is this the philosophical problem underlying CRISPR? Isn't anything else beyond the widespread availability of the technology that is troublesome? It also reiterates the dual use problem: good and bad people can have access to the technology and we need to make sure only good people have access to it
For the dual use, see Bennett et al 2009
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This is a very interesting piece regarding the development of CRISPR-Cas9. Although there is a lot of worrying about the ethical issues, those issues are never clear enough. The only one that is explicitly stated is the one regarding the modification of the human germ-line. But, even with that, in what specific sense is that problematic? Why isn't more explicit engagement with the ethical issues? Why is the 'ethical issue' alway so abstract, unable to be grasped by anyone?
The other ethical issue that is somewhat stated is the education of the general public about science.
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Innovative Genomics Initiative.
Isn't ethically problematic the relationships between IGI and the biotech industry?
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I told myself that bioethicists were better positioned to take the lead on such issues.
Isn't this attitude the "typical scientist" one? Developing technology and science that other should assess in terms of their ethical issues?
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inst-fs-iad-prod.inscloudgate.net inst-fs-iad-prod.inscloudgate.net
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Second, the proprietary knowledge theyproduce is exempt from political controls.
and democratic control
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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Some worry that this is the first step toward using gene editing to create people with extreme intelligence, beauty or athletic ability. But that, for now, is not possible. Such traits are thought to be affected by possibly hundreds of genes acting in concert, and affected in turn by the environment. The biggest ethical concerns for now are with rogue scientists enticing couples who do not realize the risks to babies that might result from the experiments. And when those children grow up, the altered genes will be passed on to their children, and to their children’s children, for generations to come
Is that how we should portray He Jiankui? Like a "rogue scientists enticing couples who do not realize the risks to babies that might result from the experiments"? But what if the current values (in the sense of a virtue ethics for example) that we uphold for the life sciences, are the ones that brought He to take these actions? Values that do not correspond to what we should think regarding science's values, but rather to the values that are usually uphold in corporations.
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inst-fs-iad-prod.inscloudgate.net inst-fs-iad-prod.inscloudgate.net
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This is a very important piece in the discussion of the ethical issues of CRISPR-Cas9. Instead on focusing only on the aspect of editing of human germ-line, the authors focus on more pressing aspects such as the use on foods, gene drives to decimate vector species, and biofuels, pharmaceuticals.
Some of the outstanding issues are:
- More transparent and accountable regulatory processes
- Risks on ecological balance and unforeseeable effects on decimating vector species
- Need to assign liability for ecological damage
- Measures to halt the effects of edited animals if they prove harmful
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Such methodscould effectively destroy an entire speciesand could have significant environmentalconsequences.
This is fundamental, and is a place in which we need a new vocabulary, that of unforeseeable consequences: who are responsible? what actions should be taken in more predictable scenarios?
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CRISPR/Cas, in contrast,recognizes its target sequence via guide RNAmolecules that can be cheaply and easilysynthesized.
Really useful sentence, because what is makes CRISPR-Cas9 special is not the possibility to modify DNA sequences, but how cheaply and easy they are
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- Dec 2018
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Or it may be itself a form of solidarity at the heart of the practice of care, because it is based on recognition of the human value of rescuing a person from fear and despair to give them a better chance of flourishing in the future.
Possible connection between solidarity and care
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Using a solidarity‐based perspective, we have argued that strategies to address this challenge need to start with a reconsideration of the value of work and labour.
How is solidarity actually informing this approach? It is possible to reach a similar conclusion without using the concept or the approach of solidarity, but only one that incorporates a critical analysis of "value" and work
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She would receive remuneration for this work as a recognition of its value for society
It is not very explicit what the authors are pointing here. In a way is not only to rethink the relation between income and work, but rather to actually pay people that do valuable work to society
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overcome the preju‐dices that lead us to attribute more value to jobs that fare better at the labour market than to the (often unpaid or underpaid) work nec‐essary for the basic functioning of our societies.
How this possible? How are prejudices eliminated? Can they be only eliminated through a thought experiment? I think that a more radical approach is needed, like the decoupling of income and work, or a new relation between income and valuable work
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- May 2018
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www.historicalmaterialism.org www.historicalmaterialism.org
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Gender, in these accounts, emerges as a technique of social control in the service of capitalist accumulation.
This might be similar to Wallerstein's account of sexism, as a social structure that serves the logic of capitalism, for example by generating labor that is not considered as such (domestic labor)
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www-nature-com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu www-nature-com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu
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The trouble with many of these responses, however, is that they take the increase in technical capacities, per se, to basically be the heart of the matter9. Ergo: technical solutions are proffered as adequate to technical problems. This technical approach is framed as 'dual use': there are good uses and bad uses, good users and bad users.
This is the division between pure and applied science, that gives immunity to the natural sciences from ethical inquiry, by assuring that the ethical inquiry should be done in the application of scientific knowledge
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www.journals.uchicago.edu www.journals.uchicago.edu
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lucid honesty
This is a fundamental aspect of the ethical reflections of Rabinow
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www.journals.uchicago.edu www.journals.uchicago.edu
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My argument is straightforward: Despite all the apparatus of private property, markets, commodity fetishism, and more, taking the gift out of the commodity is never easy. It is work that has to be repeated over and over.
How would this translate to other domains in which gift-giving is more explicit?
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