But that’s just fine, since one of the things we’ve had re-confirmed from the complete DNA sequences churned out by batteries of ABI Prism 3700’s is that organisms are not completely about complete sequences. Some other kinds of reading practices are demanded. As Craig Venter and his 273 co-authors wrote in the February 16 2001 issue of Science: “The enumeration of other "parts lists" reveals that in organisms with complex nervous systems, neither gene number, neuron number, nor number of cell types correlates in any meaningful manner with even simplistic measures of structural or behavioral complexity. Nor would they be expected to; this is the realm of nonlinearities and epigenesis.”

Since the task of reading organisms now demands reading for nonlinear and epigenetic or emergent effects, this should be an area where life scientists and historians and anthropologists of the life sciences might learn a few reading strategies from each other. Which is one of the reasons why I chose “Open Reading Frames” for a title. An “open reading frame,” or ORF, in DNA sequences terms is a sequence that doesn’t have a stop codon that would halt transcription. ORFs are those portions of the DNA sequence that are expressed, and as we now know, that often means expressed in more than a single, simple, unified, linear way. ORFs also require extensive annotation – the kind of ancillary reading and writing notes, like the marginal illuminations in a medieval manuscipt, that provide sense, order, and new interpretive openings to the main text.

I’m interested in similar effects in the domain of genomics and the media: how narratives and concepts about genes, genomes, genome projects, and genomic companies are necessarily coded and framed – they couldn’t work otherwise – but those frames don’t halt further writing and reading. Reading keeps on going, and what’s inside the media reading frames gets shaped by the annotations on the edges and even by what’s outside. I’m interested in the margins of stories, and in biological, social, and economic phenomena that get pushed to the edge of visibility.

Let me give you an example, the first of several I will take from Richard Preston’s wonderful New Yorker profile of J. Craig Venter and Celera Genomics, with one of the most direct opening lines in any genomics article ever: “Craig Venter is an asshole.” (These are somebody else’s words here at the outermost edge of Preston’s article, but they establish a frame that runs around the entire article) But it’s later in the article that Venter is quoted as saying: “My view of biology is ‘We don’t know shit.’”

Now if I were really trying to push this open reading frame business, I might try to read both of these statements in terms of some psychoanalytic anal stage narrative about assholes not knowing shit. But I’m more interested in this as a succinct statement of scientific modesty and honest recognition of the limits, margins, and frayed edges of our knowledge. The statement of modesty is, of course, buried within the margins of an article largely about immodesty, but I’d like to push the statement even further, entirely de-identifying it with Venter’s persona and taking it for the statement about the life sciences that it is.

I am so grateful when writers elicit these kinds of marginal utterances from their scientific subjects, and I immediately put them into my teaching files. The undergraduate science and engineering majors at RPI come to my classes and say back to me all the ebullient, oversimplified, overoptimistic, overdeterministic things about genomics and the human genome project that they have sucked up from various media outlets, mostly cable TV and the internet. They get positively defensive when I try to open up any hole in their certitudes about the superhuman powers that genes and genomes exert on all aspects of our lives. So it’s great to be able to throw a quote like this up on the screen, authorized with Craig Venter’s name, and ask them to reconcile it with what they think they already know about biology.

What I hope happens is not the simple reversal of “gee, I thought we knew everything about our genes and now I know we don’t know shit” – although with 18-year-olds, simple reversals are always something to watch out for. In some ways, I don’t want them to be able to reconcile the statements at all; I want it to bother them that we know things about genes that are incredible compared to what we knew even five years ago, AND we don’t know shit. What I hope for is some understanding of a frame and its margins, and at least an opening to the question: what would the world be like if appreciation of our ignorance were installed at the center of our knowledge and media frames, and immodest scientism and egoism inhabited the margins? What would television look like, what would science look like, what would ethics look like in a culture in which the aesthetics or affects attached to both knowledge and ignorance were reversed? A biology oriented more toward non-linear effects and epigenesis may be an important part of such a shift.

As I mentioned, this has been a year of heavy media attention to the “completion” of the human genome sequence. Establishing beginnings and endings are, of course, two deeply entrenched ways of framing unruly narratives and nonlinear, complex events. Beginnings and endings are dramatic and beg to be marked, and they provide the necessary moments of ritual closure and celebration. But at the same time it’s good to be reminded of what is also operating near the frame of the completion story, so let me take you back to the mid-1980s when plans for a Human Genome Project were first starting to be discussed, in terms of both the scientific and political merits of a narrative of completion.

It was at the annual Cold Spring Harbor meeting of 1986, that debate about the wisdom of doing something like the Human Genome Project really hit the scientific and popular press. In a special session at the meetings, geneticist David Botstein had just spoken passionately about the risks of a large-scale sequencing project that would “indenture all of us, especially the young people, to this enormous thing, like the space shuttle”. And then someone in the audience -- I still don’t know who – stood up and said:

I'd just like to say that perhaps we should be politicians at this point, and call it sequencing the entire human genome, and spend the money on exactly that thing. I think it's like sending men to the moon. Sending men to the moon was extremely expensive and extremely pointless, but it was -- because we could have got as much information with half the cost, with machines -- scientifically, at least. But if we go and tell Congress we're going to do something like this that the general public can understand, they'll give us the money, as long as we agree among ourselves that what we're actually going to do with it is maybe sequence the one percent of the genome that's interesting and try to develop technologies that in fact will allow us to sequence the human genome in 1999, just in time to meet the deadline.

So it’s long been recognized that a beginning and ending -- especially with a dramatic race in the middle, whether between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in space, or Venter and Collins in genoe space-- is a framing device that Congress and the general public can understand and support. And this person’s imaginative vision at Cold Spring Harbor turned out to be remarkably accurate. The race to a “complete sequence” was a media-friendly framing device, while the really important things were happening at the margins of that frame: the development of new sequencing and mapping technologies, practices, and concepts; the production and interrogation of ever more combinatorial databases through a variety of bioinformatics tools; and the training and enculturation of a next generation of scientists. All this comprised what Eric Lander once called the “Route One of Genetics,” and what Leroy Hood has called a “fantastic infrastructure:” the largely automated, high-throughput tools and techniques of genomics.

It was also always envisioned throughout the HGP debates of the late 1980s that this 1950s-style federally-funded genomic highway infrastructure would take us two places: first, to a post-genomic data landscape in which organisms could truly begin to be appreciated for the non-linear, epigenetic systems they are. Second, the infrastructure would undergird a U.S. biotechnology sector that could occupy a dominant position in a highly competitive global bioeconomy. In the late 1980s Japan was the stick used to beat Congress over the head on this issue of gobal competition, and if that threat never quite materialized the way it was thought to, the end result has been the same. In 1987, not even a Nobel laureate like Wally Gilbert could convince enough pharmaceutical companies and venture capitalists that there was a viable future in the production, copyrighting, and selling of genomic information; in 1997, an Icelandic scientist with no record of genomic research could leverage $12 million in venture capital and a $200 million promise from Hoffman La-Roche, to become a player in an already well-established, highly competitive, and highy volatile genomics economy. But that’s getting ahead of myself.

Let’s return briefly to Venter, here on the cover of Business Week with an ancient Greek expression hovering in the space over his head. I’m interested in the identification of the genomics company with its CEO that happens often in the media. Part of this personalization effect is that a face of a guy looks better on the cover of your magazine than some high-tech stripmall building in Rockville. But there was certainly some “taking it personally” between Venter and Francis Collins. The sentiment on the public side of things seemed to be more “that asshole did it to us” rather than “the genomics political economy that we helped establish years ago by funding the HGP infrastructure to keep America competitive has now come back in the form of Celera/PE Systems to bite us in the ass…” Just as non-linear and epigenetic effects so often get collapsed and reduced into “gene x causes trait y,” a very complex political economy of bioinformation and biomaterials is collapsed into “Craig Venter.”

And let me stress again: it’s not so much a question of right and wrong readings here. Craig Venter is Celera Genomics within some limited reading frames, as surely as gene x causes trait y within some limited reading frames. But that doesn’t preclude other ways of reading that can be just as truthful and necessary. Perhaps it’s best to say: Celera Genomics, like all good nonlinear systems, both is and isn’t Craig Venter, and it’s always the irresolvable tension of the AND that is so productive – in organisms, in the life sciences, and in economies. And in history.

Now I’d like to shift territories to a different identification between a genomics company and its CEO, but I want to get there via a marginal route.

As Preston tells the story, sometime in the early spring of 2000, Celera began assembling the human DNA sequences it had been churning out from multiple shotgunned fragments – “a pretty boring” job, according to Venter. Which may explain why the moment had to be amped up with a little ritual:

Minutes later, one of [Greg] Myers’s people, a computer scientist named Knut Reinert, hurried in, and told him that the first assembled human-genome sequence had just come out of the computers. Myers put the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ on the boom box, and fifteen people tried to crowd into Reinert’s cubicle.

Myers bent over Reinert’s shoulder and said, “We got it! We got the first one! This is the first assembled human sequence we’ve gotten out of nature!…

They talked about it for a few minutes, and then everyone drifted back to work. That day, Celera’s stock dropped another twenty percent.

It’s too bad one can’t own stock in RichardWagner.com, since the dramatic musical purveyance of old Norse myths of supernatural women swooping down over battlefields to gather dead Viking heroes and resurrect them to a new life in Valhalla clearly presents an opportunity for ongoing future returns.

As the case of the U.S. corporation deCODE Genetics, operating in Iceland, makes clear. A series of old and contemporary Viking myths have been invoked by deCODE and its volatile CEO and founder Kari Stefansson. These myths, particularly the parts depicting the supposed isolation and homogeneity of Iceland and its population, have been reiterated consistently in both the Icleandic and international media, and have been vital to deCODE’s efforts to leverage itself into the competitive global genomics economy.

A very brief and simplified encapsulation for those few of you who may not be familiar with the deCODE Genetics saga. Often called an Icelandic company, deCODE is a U.S. corporation founded in 1996 by Stefansson while he was at Beth Israel Deaconness Medical Center, with $12 million from U.S. venture capital firms associated with Harvard and the University of Chicago. With virtually no record of gene discovery research, let alone high-throughput genomics work of any kind, Stefansson leveraged deCODE to international attention when he secured a 5-year promise of $200 million in research and milestone payments from the Swiss company Hoffmann-La Roche in February 1998.

It was at the time billed as the largest deal ever between a genomics company and a major pharmaceutical company – and highly symbolic for Iceland in particular, as evidenced by the public signing ceremony staged for the Icelandic media, in which Prime Minister David Oddson passed the pen between Kari Stefansson and Jonathan Knowles of Roche. In March 1998, legislation was introduced into the Icelandic Parliament – legislation which, thanks to the Icelandic equivalent of the Freedom of Information Act, is now known to have been drafted by Stefansson and deCODE’s lawyers rather than the Ministry of Health – legislation that would establish a “Health Sector Database” comprised of the medical records of every Icelander, and grant a 12-year exclusive monopoly license to one anonymous licensee, which everyone knew to be deCODE. That first legislation, which all sides now agree was badly written, was stopped by a number of people in the Icelandic medical and genetics research communities, including Jorunn Eyfjord and Helga Ogmundsdottir at the Icelandic Cancer Research Society, who had done wonderful work on the BRCA2 gene, and Gudmundur Eggertsson, the biologist who had first introduced recombinant DNA techniques into teaching and research at the University of Iceland in the early 1970s. There followed nine months of what is called, for lack of a better word, democratic debate. I went to Iceland for the first time in September 1998 in the midst of this, with daily newspaper, radio and television stories, public talks, and other events happening all around. I’ll come back to this in moment. After much public and private wrangling and politicking, the parliament passed the Health Sector Database Act in December 1998, with a 37-20 vote that closely followed party lines (with the conservative Independence Party of Prime Minister Oddson in the majority). The Health Sector Database, which it is important to note has yet to be built, will be combined into what is called the deCODE Combined Data Processing capability (DCDP), that will cross-link the health records with two other databases: a computerized version of the well-maintained genealogical records of Iceland, and a database of newly produced genetic information from blood samples gathered from Icelanders in collaboration with Icelandic physicians (at least some of whom are deCODE shareholders). You may have read all about this in that other The New Yorker article about famous genomics company CEOs, “Iceland Decoded” by Michael Specter.

A book could be written about the complexities of these events, which is what I’m currently doing. So here I’ll just be pulling out a very few strands that illuminate the particularly volatile intersections of genomics and the media that emerged in Iceland, but which may also tell us something about genomics more generally.

The Health Sector Database of medical records was enacted on the principle of “presumed consent”: every Icelander living and dead was presumed to have given their consent to place their medical records in the database, and individuals were then granted the new right to “opt out” of the database – although they could not opt out their dead relatives, even though they share some of the same genetic information. The graph here charts the number of opt-outs, but it also charts some of the social forces in these events. The number of opt-outs rises steeply at first, and then abruptly slows down in June 1999, as most Icelanders mistakenly assumed that this was the cut-off date for opting out. In January 2000, deCODe was formally granted the license to the database, and the opt-out rate increases again as people were reminded of the ongoing reality of the matter. It now appears to be leveling off just as it approaches 20,000 people or 7% of the population, perhaps a reflection of the fact that people are just plain tired of dealing with all of this.

At every possible opportunity Stefansson and deCODE – the two are even more impossible to separate than Venter and Celera – like to point to the nine months of media frenzy as a sign of the democratic debate which went on in Iceland about the Health Sector Database, conveniently leaving out the fact that he and the company had tried to sidestep any debate at all by trying to rush the first draft of the act through the parliament at the very end of the spring 1998 legislative session. Other anthropologists who have begun to analyze the events in Iceland swirling around deCODE Genetics and the Health Sector Database have written that “some 700 newspaper articles in the press, 150 television programmes, a series of town meetings, and endless discussion and debate both within the Parliament and the shopping centers” can be said to constitute “nine months of national debate." In a similar vein, Paul Billings, a very responsible geneticist by all our usual metrics of responsibility, reassured readers of the American Scientist that “after a broad-based public debate, employing democratic institutions including a free press and independent legislature, the country imposed limits on this new biomedical effort…[T]he construction of science and its associated enterprises by the people of Iceland is paradigmatic; it represents an example of the assertion of national principles and sovereignty over international science and biotechnology. The outcome of gene hunting in Iceland may be better in the end than in North America or Europe.”

One of my jobs as historian and anthropologist of science is to trace out the specific details of how a free press actually operates, and what gets qualified as debate.

Full disclosure: I am not one of the approximately 283,000 people in the world who speak and read Icelandic. But I have been interviewed numerous times by Icelandic journalists and so became part of the debate, and learned a thing or two about the Icelandic media in the process. This article, titled “The debate comes too late,” appeared in the second largest of the Icelandic newspapers in September 1998. It was written by an art historian home for the summer, earning some extra cash. That’s one small sign of the weak tradition of science reporting in Iceland. Journalists there are just now inventing the genre of in-depth science reporting on complex issues of a complex science and its complex social implications. In addition, I had many radio and print journalists telling me stories off the record about having been screamed at by Stefansson or sometimes threatened with a law suit if they said or wrote anything that departed from the company line. (I’ve gotten similar stories from a number of U.S.-based journalists as well.)

In general, the vast majority of those hundreds of media accounts that are cited as evidence of a democratic debate in Iceland were little more than dressed-up deCODE press releases issued on a regular basis, passing on messages about jobs for Icelanders, predictions of wealth in the national coffers, and pieties about how Iceland would contribute to the improvement of world health and the universal progress of biomedical research. The major daily newspaper Morgunbladid is perhaps the worst offender in this regard, but another small marker would be the fact that the former vice president of news for the Icelandic national television station 2, Pall Magnusson, is now director of communications for deCODE.

I’ll come back to the Icelandic media in a bit, but let’s turn briefly to the international press, which will also bring us back to the question of Iceland’s isolation and the genetic homogeneity that is supposed to be associated with it.

The homogeneity or purity of the Icelandic population was never so much a question as it was simply assumed to be true, on the basis of some mythic understanding reinforced by deCODE press releases.
Natural born guinea pigs
*“the most homogeneous population on earth”
*an “island so inbred that it is a happy genetic hunting ground”
*a “largely blue-eyed, blond-haired populace”
*“a nearly homogeneous population” . . . “carrying nearly the same genetic codes as the Viking explorers who settled here more than 1,100 years ago” . . . with “little immigration to muddy the genetic pool over the centuries”

The headlines and soundbites here from the international press indicate the prevalence and power of this assumption, summed up most strikingly in this cover from Mother Jones that purports to be critical of the Icelandic-deCODE project even as it uncritically repeats its most tendentious and exoticist claim: Iceland is a nation of blonde-haired, blue-eyed babes. And, presumably, hunks.

Now what continues to puzzle me is why this reading frame was never opened up by reading it against another quasi-mythic image so readily available in pop culture. Bjork, Iceland’s other famous media-hyped personality, may not be Richard Wagner, but she certainly has sold a lot of records, including 1997’s Homogenic and its utter and complete ironization of the pure, natural, homogenic Icelander. Why didn’t a single journalist, anywhere, ever even flip through their collection of CDs or People magazines and just simply ask the opening question: what’s up here? How do we know what the characteristics of the “typical Icelander” are?

It’s a question that can be approached via more rigorous avenues than those of pop music – although it’s also a question that can’t be fully settled. In contrast to deCODE’s homgeneity claim, through an analysis of both mitchondrial DNA and a genome-wide set of 300 microsatellite markers, Einar Arnason and 2 other Icelandic population geneticists have argued in Nature Genetics that, in comparison to other Scandinavian and European populations, Icleand is among the most heterogenous – surpassed only by Spain and Turkey in some measures of genetic difference.

At best, the most one can now say is that the homogeneity or heterogeneity of the Icelandic population as a whole remains a matter of scientific dispute and questioning. One danger of presuming a greater degree of homogeneity than may actually exist in Iceland is, as Joseph Terwilliger and Kenneth Weiss argue in a recent Current Opinions in Biotechnology, an increased number of false positives in gene discovery experiments. It’s also a good question as to what difference the degree of genetic difference in a population makes when it comes to genomics-based gene discovery projects applied to entire populations. Estonia, for example, now argues that its more heterogenous population will not only serve as a better platform for gene discovery, but because it represents the actual heterogeneity of Caucasian populations better than Iceland does, it serves as a better proving ground for the testing, marketing, and sales of future pharmacogenomics-based drugs.

At any rate, it’s clear that deCODe held out the bait of a uniquely homogenous population, and journalists and investors in Iceland and the U.S. took it hook, line, and sinker, as they say in the fishihg industry that still accounts for a good 70% of Iceland’s foreign earnings. In multiple media stories, on investment web sites, in deCODE’s own registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the “unmuddied” quality of the gene pool was the big selling point that distinguished this otherwise undistinguished company from the genomics pack.

And like every other genomics company, deCODE issued a continual stream of press releases detailing its latest achievements and discoveries: the mapping or isolation of markers or candidate genes “for” – in the familiar and inaccurate shorthand – for conditions including pre-eclampsia, osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s, and most recently schizophrenia. But the later publication of some article in the scientific literature substantiating these claims appears with far less frequency in the case of deCODE than with companies like Celera, Millennium, Human Genome Sciences, and other genomics companies. With deCODE, one gets a press release, and little else.

Like the homogeneity line, that too has worked quite well thus far – especially in Iceland itself, where many people were happy to combine their well-intentioned desire to contribute to biomedical research and to support what they saw as an Icelandic company, with a newfound enthusiasm for the stock market. The Icelandic Stock Exchange has really only operated since 1998, and a key official there described to me the operations of what was called “the gray market” and how it allowed deCODE to spread its financial risk among the supposedly homogenous Icelandic population.

In the two years before deCODE’s July 2000 IPO on the NASDAQ exchange, the state banks of Iceland bought shares of preferred stock in the company. The banks encouraged Icelandic journalists and others to spread the good news about deCODE and its reported discoveries, and then re-sold the preferred stock they had bought, ever more valuable with each news story, to the genome-enthusiast Icelanders. A total of 11.1 million shares of deCODE were traded on the gray market, pre-IPO. Some 6,000 Icelanders bought stock on the “gray market” like this at prices between $30 and $65 per share; by contrast, deCODE opened on NASDAQ in July 2000 at $18, bubbled up briefly to around $30, and now trades around $9. Many of the Icelanders took out second mortgages or other forms of bank loans to buy into the national enterprise. The securities laws have now been changed in Iceland to preclude exactly the kind of activitiy that went on in the case of deCODE and the state banks.

The Iceland story is a particularly intense and volatile example of the kinds of media-enhanced volatilities that characterize the genomics scene more generally. It’s a story that indexes the importance of stories in today’s genomics economy. Biotech and genomics stocks are some of the best exemplars of what are called “story stocks” on Wall Street: stocks whose value, even more so than “regular” stocks, is contingent upon the kind of narrative that can be spun around them. (The name “story stocks” dates to around 1994, when “certain stocks for which an intriguing argument could be made – called story stocks – began responding largely to chat-room comment and newsletter hype.”

The genomics companies, like their dot-com cousins, depend on intriguing narratives of open-ended futures for their value. They depend on speculation. In his book “irrational exuberance,” the economist Robert Shiller has described how speculative bubbles since the tulip-mania of the seventeenth century have been blown up by narrative-dependent anticipations, and how that process has always required the media for its production. In Schiller’s analysis, one of the most important features of the great speculative bubble of the late 1990s (if, indeed, it was a bubble) was the intensification of this media effect in the economy. This was most evident with the Internet stocks, Shiller argues, but it is also an important feature in the genomics economy as well, with the daily and even hourly obsessive attention to genomics stock values through on-line news and stock services; and a multiplicity of narrative forecasts, projections, and other anticipatory stories channeled through television channels, newspapers, and magazines.

Before I conclude, I’d like to address one more set of stories illustrating the vital effects that occur at the margins of the media and the speculative economy of the late 20th century. These stories – about evoving definitions of informed consent – place genomics within a larger context of people’s attitudes toward and participation in biomedical research, and changing principles and protocols of informed consent. And by the “people” in “people’s attitudes toward biomedical research,” I include scientists, as you’ll see.

In my brief discussion of deCODE and the social volatility it has caused in Iceland, I didn’t mention the controversies that have polarized the biomedical community and Iceland society at large over the departure from traditional principles of informed consent in biomedical research. Einar Arnason, the population geneticist who has questioned the homogeneity of the Icelandic population, lost his position on Iceland’s National Bioethics Committee, along with all the other members the committee, in the summer of 2000, when they were all summarily dismissed by the Minister of Health. The NBC had modeled new Icelandic informed consent procedures on those used by such organizations as the American Society for Human Genetics, and these were procedures that deCODE did not want to follow; deCODE demanded Arnason’s recusal from any matter loosely related to deCODE before the committee, on the basis of letters he had written to the media, the New York Times and the Times of London. The Minister of Health simply disbanded the whole lot, and reappointed a new National Bioethics Committee. This is one way in which democratic government actually works in Iceland.

But the story I want to close with comes from our own, U.S. National Bioethics Advisory Commission. It comes from a discussion not of genomics per se, but about what will happen to informed consent protocols in an era in which many U.S. citizens have come to expect and demand access to the newest, most experimental drug therapies – a trend that will undoubtedly intensify in the age of pharmacogenomics and its promise of individualized drug treatments – [oh] as we anticipate drugs of the future. The story illustrates, I think, the subtle but powerful ways in which the publicity-generating machines of biomedical research and the current speculative climate in the stock market work at the margins of scientific imagination and practice. It also illustrates how scientists themselves can often be the most sensitive readers of these open reading frames

In one of the Commission’s public meetings, the bioethicist Jeffrey Kahn spoke about informed consent, and the changes in the biomedical research enviroment since the days of the Belmont Report which codified many of those processes and principles in the 1970s. Kahn addressed a wide range of issues, including the change in social expectations in the U.S. whereby getting into a clinical trial for an experimental drug or treatment had gone from guinea-pig suspicion to the most sought-after, “best” medical care available. His presentation left Stanford geneticist David Cox wanting to ask two related questions.

First, asked Cox, “why do you think it is that we have switched in this format from protecting people to everyone clamoring for the benefits? Where are those benefits and why has that come about? I have my own views but I would be very interested in yours.” The second related question, Cox continued, was “if this is more in the context of explaining to people that they are partaking in a risky situation, which I actually think that that is exactly what the process is about, then why would anybody want to do it?”

Kahn answered in terms of historical and social complexity: the 80s and 90s gave us a “mixed up” “cocktail” of AIDS activists demanding the reconfiguration of clinical trials and inclusion in them, women with breast cancer and other conditions similarly demanding greater attention to and direct involvement in research on women’s health issues, and other large-scale changes in the culture of biomedical research. As a result, Kahn suggested, experimental biomedical research and its speculative treatments had become not only a normal part of the health care system, but a normal expectation.
Cox agreed with Kahn’s narrative, but then added some of his own views as he had promised earlier in the discussion. The geneticist Cox knew his own culture better than the bioethicist Kahn, or simply felt more at liberty to critique it in public:

I would have added one other thing: I think over the past 10 years the research community has become extremely adept at their own public relations…to the point where even they believe it…[A]nd there is some truth to it but not on the time scale that it is represented. So it is long-term gains, not short-term gains. It is like the stock market. We should have some stock people actually doing this for us so that -- so I really think that things have changed in my view. I think you are right but not because the process of consent has changed but because the players have changed and gotten -- have changed sort of what the game is to get people to enroll.

Scientists like David Cox can help all of us read the margins -- of organisms, of research communities, and of stock markets. He tells a brief story about indirect links, feedback loops, partial or emergent truths, compelling p.r., and other nonlinearities that give rise to raised expectations among all participants in the game – the people taking drugs, the researchers that develop drugs, the people who invest in the corporations that make drugs. I’d call this changed game that Cox describes, the game of speculating on, and within, complex systems. If only because we can’t seem to escape these two words, complexity and speculation, at this historical moment. It’s in this complex game of speculating on drugs-of-the-future that the need for the frame shift that I spoke of at the beginning of this talk – centralizing an appreciation of our ignorance, nudging our scientific and social optimism more toward the margins -- might be most urgent and necessary.

You certainly don’t need me to tell you that this is an exhilirating time in the life sciences – a time of nonlinearites and epigenesis in which the linearities of something like the Central Dogma—DNA codes for RNA codes for protein—would sound like a crude joke, best forgotten, if only it hadn’t been so incredibly productive for so many decades. It is a time in which, as Ognjenka Vukmirovic and Shirley Tilghman write in Nature Biotechnology,

It is hardly a coincidence that many universities and research institutes, including our own, are making major investments in multidisciplinary life-science initiatives to explore the complexity of living things. Organisms are networks of genes, which make networks of proteins, which regulate genes, and so on ad infinitum. The amount of complex data that will be generated, and the need for modeling to understand the way networks function, will ensure that disciplines outside of biology will be required to collaborate in this problem, if the ultimate goal to deconstruct such networks is to come to fruition.

It’s that ad infinitum part that I find most interesting, and inviting. For the complex, nonlinear games of genomics today, we’re going to need equally complex stories and analyses that truly do continue the series, if not ad infinitum, then at least well “outside of biology”: networks of genes which make networks of proteins which are channeled through networks of machines which are sold by networks of corporations which are supported by networks of investors with networks of expectations which are fed by the major media networks which will eventually sell those networks of genes. My hope is that opening the reading frames in such a way will keep future Icelands from happening, and help bring the many promises of genomics to fruition.

Mike Fortun is assistant professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a Founding Fellow of the Institute for Science and Interdisciplinary Studies. He is co-author, with Herbert J. Bernstein, of Muddling Through: Pursuing Science and Truths in the 21st Century (Counterpoint, 1998). Read a review at http://physicsweb.org/article/review/13/3/3.