Guggenheim Fellowships
We begin with profiles of Ken Alder and Michael Bess, two of the seven 2008 Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellows whose projects are connected to the history of science. The remaining winners will be profiled in the upcoming issues.
Ken Alder is Professor of History and Milton H. Wilson Professor of the Humanities at Northwestern University where he directs the Science in Human Culture Program. Alder is working on a book project titled “The Forensic Self: Personal Identification from the Renaissance to the Genome.”
My goal for the fellowship period is to write a history of the forensic sciences that examines how the techniques of personal identification have defined our self-understanding, not just as individual citizens before the law, but as members of “racial” groups and as individuals located within historical genealogies. During the past decade new techniques of genetic typing – increasingly used by our legal system to identify individuals – have also been read for clues as to the person’s “race” and lineage, as well as his or her propensity for suspect behavior. As governments compile vast databases of biometric data and private firms make genetic tests commercially available, there is concern that probabilistic correlations will be translated into facile judgments about moral fitness and racial kinship.
This project documents the long history of these concerns. I have organized my project into five components, each taking up a forensic technique focused on a particular feature of the body. A first chapter on handwriting analysis during the Renaissance will be followed by successive chapters on anthropometry in the nineteenth century, fingerprinting in the early twentieth, serological typing in the mid-twentieth, and contemporary genetic testing. My method will be both comparative and synthetic: juxtaposing the use of identification in the Anglo-American and French-Continental legal systems, and traversing the discontinuities of the early modern and modern eras. I will ask: How have the sciences of bodily identification shaped our sense of who we are?
The project takes its title from John Locke, who coined the term, “the forensic self,” for the second edition of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. In the first edition, Locke had set out to show how the human mind comes to know the world through the senses. Locke, however, quickly found himself explaining how the mind, from its start as tabula rasa, could ever arrive at a sense of its own coherence. In his controversial new Chapter 27 Locke suggested that the continuity of the self reflected the individual’s accountability to external forces, to the criminal law in the first instance, and on the Day of Final Judgment in the last. As the subject of reward and punishment, the forensic self is an inescapably moral being.
This book examines the forensic techniques which make us accountable, without presupposing that Locke’s individualistic account is the sole way one might define the self – or should. My preliminary hypothesis is that the practices of forensic identification have sustained long-term continuities in the self-understanding of the answerable citizen, even as other dimensions of people’s sense of identity have shifted dramatically across the centuries. In The Forensic Self, I seek to understand how in measuring ourselves as individuals we fit ourselves to the social body – and to its histories.
Michael Bess is Chancellor’s Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. He is a specialist in twentieth-century Europe, with a particular interest in the social and cultural impacts of technological change. His project is titled “Icarus 2.0: A Historian’s Perspective on Human Biological Enhancement.”
This book project explores the ethical and social implications of new technologies for human biological enhancement. These technologies, designed to reconfigure or boost our physical and mental capabilities, are developing rapidly in three distinct but interconnected domains: pharmaceuticals, bioelectronics, and genetics. Over recent decades, as innovations in these fields have accumulated, they have begun reaching into our lives with increasing force, raising profound questions about what it means to be human.
One significant feature of this topic is how much it all sounds like science fiction. Yet precisely because we associate human enhancement with the often bizarre worlds depicted in novels and movies, we tend to underestimate the evidence of radical change that is steadily accumulating all around us. Each new breakthrough in genetics, robotics, prosthetics, neuroscience, nanotechnology, psychopharmacology, brain-machine interfaces, and similar fields, appears as an isolated “futuristic” event taking place in an otherwise unaltered landscape. What we miss here is the cumulative importance of all these developments taken together.
I argue that four fundamental themes have dominated the debates over human enhancement. The first is that of technological determinism. Some scholars have claimed that the immense social and economic forces propelling human enhancement are ultimately irresistible, while others have maintained that vigorous governmental intervention can still avert a “post-human” future. I lay out a third position, basing my argument on an analogy drawn from the history of the environmental movement since the 1960s (the subject of my second book, The Light-Green Society).
A second major issue has to do with the commodification of humans. I suggest that enhancement technologies pose a serious moral risk, precisely because they tempt us to think of persons as entities that can be “improved.” As soon as one takes this step, one is (whether intentionally or not) breaking down human personhood into a series of quantifiable traits like body shape, resistance to disease, intelligence, emotions, and sociability. The danger here lies in reducing individuals to the status of products, artifacts, or commodities: we risk losing touch with that ineffable quality of intrinsic value that we all share, no matter what our traits may be.
A third recurring theme centers on the question of democratic access. If we cannot provide even rudimentary equality in access to basic education and health care today, why should we believe that our society will have any greater success in doing so with enhancement technologies half a century from now? This tendency toward “bio-stratification” will constitute one of the most serious challenges posed by the advent of enhancement technologies.
Finally, if human enhancement becomes widespread, one of the outcomes may be an incremental fragmentation of humankind, based on varying biologies, dissimilar machine components, and sharply contrasting abilities. These technologies are not mere superficial markers of social difference, like clothes, jewelry, or tattoos. They hold the potential to alter the fundamental constitution of individuals, ranging across their entire profile of physical and mental capabilities. It is not implausible, therefore, to envision a dystopian evolutionary process through which our species gradually splits into discrete sub-cultures and lineages having increasingly little in common with each other.