The Promise of Indigenous Epigenetics
By Emma Kowal,
Discover Society
| 10. 04. 2016
For the last two decades, Indigenous peoples have consistently resisted genetics on local, national and international scales. Awareness of genetics as a potentially harmful science spread through Indigenous organisations in the mid 1990s after the U.S. National Institutes of Health attempted to patent a virus found in the blood of a Papua New Guinean man, and the Human Genome Diversity Project attempted to collect DNA samples from indigenous peoples, who they called ‘Isolates of Historical Interest’, from around the world (Reardon 2005). The U.S.-based NGO Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism was formed in response.
Although genetics has transformed in the ‘post-genomic’ age (a term used for the period after the human genome was sequenced), its reputation among Indigenous peoples continues to be strained. Genetics is often seen as deterministic and victim-blaming, diverting attention and resources from social and political causes of ill-health, reinforcing ideologies of Indigenous inferiority within Western science, facilitating the theft of genetic biological resources and knowledge, and as the source of inflated, unjustified hype that offers little or no benefit to Indigenous people (TallBear 2013).
Adding the...
Related Articles
Image courtesy National Human Genome Research Institute
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is supposed to encourage effective medical advances while also ensuring that patients and research subjects are protected. This dual mandate demands tricky judgment calls that are made more difficult by outside pressures of several kinds, political, judicial, and especially commercial. This April story at Bloomberg examines one deeply troubling pattern of regulatory capture:
Americans Are Paying Billions to Take Drugs That Don’t Work
Companies are increasingly...
By Elizabeth Chuck, NBC News | 07.09.2024
A Netflix docuseries has put a spotlight on the unregulated world of sperm donation, particularly the lack of stopgap measures that might prevent donors who have been banned by one country from simply going elsewhere to donate more.
Released earlier...
By Amanda Becker and Shefali Luthra, The 19th | 07.08.2024
Image by Duke University Archives from Flickr
Republicans have adopted a slate of policy positions ahead of next week’s convention that does not call for a federal legislative abortion ban, but opens the door to establishing fetal personhood.
The Republican...
By Isabelle Bartram
| 07.17.2024
Image by Kuzzat Altay from Unsplash
Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim minority in China, are mainly located in the autonomous region of Xinjiang. The Chinese government has pursued an aggressive settlement policy in this region since 1949, with the percentage of Han Chinese in the region increasing from five to forty percent in the second half of the 20th century. Since 2014, the Uyghurs have been subject to persecution and re-education – various sources have estimated that at least one million...