나눔방2008. 06. 04 02:53 | 조회수:119 입김
Charis Thompson
(http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?sid=08BB8ECF-2CE2-4DC0-9D42-9A6F2D8728D2&ttype=2&tid=10491)
Charis Thompson PhD (Sociology) University of California, San Diego, Associate Professor in the Departments of Gender and Women's Studies and Rhetoric, Co-Director, Science, Technology, and Society Center
Areas of Interest
Science and technology studies, reproductive and genetic technologies, transnational comparative studies of reproduction, population, biodiversity and environment, feminist theory
Selected Publications
Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technology (MIT Press, 2005).
"Fertile Ground: Feminists Theorize Infertility," in eds., M. Inhorn, and F. van Balen, Interpreting Infertility: Childlessness, Gender, and New Reproductive Technologies In Global Perspective. (University of California Press, 2002).
"Strategic Naturalizing: Kinship in an Infertility Clinic," in eds. S. Franklin and S. McKinnon, New Directions in Kinship Study: A Core Concept Revisited (2002).
"When Elephants Stand for Competing Models of Nature," in A. Mol and J. Law eds., Complexity in Science, Technology, and Medicine (Duke University Press, 2001).
"Primate Suspect: Some Varieties of Science Studies," in eds. S. Strum and L. Fedigan, Close Encounters: Primates, Science and Scientists (Chicago University Press, 1999).
"Confessions of a Bioterrorist: subject position and the valuing of reproductions," in eds. S. Squier and A. Kaplan, Reproductive Technologies and Representation (Rutgers University Press, 1999).
"Producing Reproduction: Techniques of Normalization and Naturalization in an Infertility Clinic," in eds. S. Franklin and H. Ragone, Reproducing Reproduction: Kinship, Power, and Technological Innovation (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998) 66-101.
"Ontological Choreography: Agency for Women Patients in an Infertility Clinic," in eds. M. Berg and A. Mol, Differences in Medicine: Unraveling Practices, Techniques and Bodies (Duke University Press, 1998).
Teaching
Stem Cells, Cloning, and the Genetic Imaginary; Gender, Race, and Science; Environmental Ethics; The Body in Contemporary Culture; Medicine as Identity, Expertise, and Governance; Population and Reproduction in Transnational Perspective; Science and Technology Studies; Feminist Theory; Foundations of American Cybercultures.
Address
Rhetoric Department
3412 Dwinelle Hall
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720
510.642-8528
E-mail: charis@berkeley.edu
illuminations: Berkeley's online magazine of research in the arts and humanitis
-illuminations is published online by the Division of Arts & Humanities in the College of Letters and Science at the University of California, Berkeley. illuminations spotlights current research being undertaken in the arts and humanities by faculty and students in the College of Letters and Science and elsewhere at U.C. Berkeley.
(http://illuminations.berkeley.edu/archives/2006/article.php?volume=2&story=1 )
#Difficult Proposition
Berkeley prof at the center of California's stem cell debate
Charis Thompson has a knack for timing. As a history of science professor at Harvard in 2001, she taught a class called "Stem Cells, Cloning, and the Genetic Imaginary" just as President George W. Bush barred the federal government from funding the creation of new stem cell lines for medical research.
In 2003, Thompson arrived at Berkeley as a professor of rhetoric and women's studies. She taught the same class again, just as debate began to heat up over Proposition 71, the since-passed $3 billion bond issue to fund stem cell research in California. Thompson's expertise in the bioethics of stem cells meant that partisans on both sides began lobbying for her support as soon as she arrived on the West Coast. It has also meant that Thompson has found herself at the center of a debate that has engulfed the world in controversy over nothing less than what it means to be human.
Charis Thompson
The mild-mannered Thompson may seem an unlikely scholar to find in the middle of such a nasty fray. But her bracingly original thinking on the ethics of stem cell research, and Proposition 71 in particular, have forced scientists, policymakers, and activists to reckon with her ideas.
"I'm quite a supporter of stem cell research," Thompson says, "but I have some slightly unorthodox views about it."
As the campaign for Proposition 71 built momentum, Thompson refused to take sides. She says that even today, the bill's supporters have not done enough to address the issue of access among the uninsured to new therapies that could emerge from Prop. 71-funded research. She compares the issuing of a state-funded bond to putting up money to build a new bridge.
"It was almost as if you were saying let's build a bridge and rich people can go across free and people with some kind of coverage can pay a toll and poor people have to walk around the shoreline," she says.
For Thompson, the "stratification" of health care connects directly to a common objection to human embryonic stem cell research voiced by several feminist bioethicists, of which Thompson considers herself one. Though perhaps the most visible opponents to Proposition 71 were anti-abortion activists who object to embryonic stem cell research on religious grounds, some feminists and others raised the specter of eugenics as the likely end result of stem cell research done without appropriate restrictions in place. What's to stop private companies, they asked, from using stem cell technologies to help engineer "designer babies," manipulating the genes of embryos to create bigger, faster, smarter children for those who could afford it?
Thompson, who has spent most of her academic career studying the anthropology of assistive reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization, says fears of genetically-engineered children overlook a more pernicious form of eugenics already at work across the United States, which she calls "selective pronatalism."
Mouse embryonic stem cells
Courtesy National Science Foundation
"That's where the state and society in material terms promotes the reproduction of some people and restricts the reproduction of others," she says.
According to Thompson, most states will subsidize contraception for adults who lack health care coverage. But those same uninsured can rely on no state assistance for access to fertility clinics or other assistive reproductive technologies. One class of people is "implicitly materially encouraged to reproduce," Thompson says, while another is discouraged.
"It seems to me that we should be worried about 'designer' and 'perfectability' in that kind of setting," she says, "so much more than in helping someone whose first child died have a baby."
Thompson's other less-than-orthodox views include a belief that stem cell lines should be labeled "like organic food." In other words, as new therapies are developed, patients can have a say in where the stem cells used to treat them come from. She describes the notation of stem cell lines as an FDA-style approach that should be a part of any stem-cell banking initiative. Among other positive consequences, she says, this approach could help assuage concerns of those who object to human embryonic stem cells on religious grounds.
"So that if you are an evangelical Christian or a Catholic who opposes research using embryos, you can restrict yourself to stem cell lines coming from either adult stem cells or derived in ways not repugnant to you."
Yet what concerns Thompson the most about Proposition 71 has little to do with stem cells in particular. What bothers her more is the use of the ballot box as a way to fund science. Since World War II, she says, the American approach to science funding at the federal level, whether through the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health, has meant research applications submitted to a rigorous peer-review process. The end result, she says, is that only the best science tends to get funded.
With a ballot initiative, she says, politics inevitably comes into play.
"Some people say that a bond issue is direct democracy; people have gone to the ballot and voted for it," she says. "I'm not so sure that it actually does serve democratic goals. Democratic goals might be better served by having a separation of science [from politics] so that science isn't serving some ideology."
As the project director for Berkeley's Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of stem cell research program, Thompson has helped design the bioethics curriculum required of any institution set to receive funds from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the state agency created by Proposition 71. She sits on the vice-chancellor's advisory committee on human embryonic stem cell research and has been invited to present her views on these issues at CIRM. In just the past year, she has spoken in South Korea, Vienna, and Istanbul on stem cells, and is at work on a book, tentatively titled Stem Cell Nations, which will examine the issues of science and democracy, the biomedicalization of life, and the geopolitics of stem cell research. She is also the co-director of Berkeley's Science, Technology, and Society Center.
With so many responsibilities, and so much engagement with policy debate, Thompson may seem to have stepped outside the realm of pure academia. Yet she says that scholarship remains her priority -- that for her, as a rhetoritician, every facet of the debate ultimately becomes data.
"Writing in such a way that you can inform policy is extremely important," she says. "Having said that, policy is not what I do. I try to understand the different worlds I have mapped out and try to understand different points of view."
– Marcus Wohlsen
- charisthompson.hwp (20.5 KB)
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