Two earlier posts (here and here) described the useful detail that Nobel laureate John Sulston has brought to the intuition that we should treat the human genome as a commons, not as territory to be exploited by private entrepreneurs.
But why do we need detailed and practical arguments of the kind that Sulston provides? Isn’t it simpler to say that the genome is sacred, and that we don’t commercialize it simply because it is wrong to traffic in sacred things?
Myself, I’d say “Yes, the genome is sacred,” but not in order to substitute for Sulston’s science. To speak of the sacred is, for me, a shorthand way of summarizing the values Sulston’s approach embodies.
In trying to explain what I mean by this I have found useful a line of thought developed by Michael Sandel in his Tanner Lectures on “The Moral Limits of Markets.”
Sandel suggests that when people say that some things should lie beyond the marketplace (e.g., sexual favors, votes, babies — or the human genome), they often mean that these things belong to certain categories and that it matters to us that the categories be kept clear.
Take the case of buying and selling votes. If our conception of the ideal democracy includes the notion that each citizen is capable and obliged to deliberate about the political good, then we will resist situations in which citizens are encouraged to sell their votes. We do so because commercialization corrupts the ideal; it moves voting from one category (politics) into another (commerce).
Sandel calls this way of explaining the limits of markets “the argument from corruption,” where “corruption” means the inappropriate moving of something from one category to another. All corruption arguments, Sandel writes, call into question “an assumption that informs much market-oriented thinking,” i.e., “that all goods are commensurable,” that they can be “translated without loss into a single measure.”
The categories by which we organize our lives have, finally, something to do with our sense of the good. We are not sorting dogs and cats here, but social practices and ways of living. In the voting example, we assert “the good” of a certain kind of government. We draw the line and refuse to allow the selling of votes because, well, democracy is sacred.
To return with this in mind to the case of the human genome, to say it is sacred is to assert the good of all the things outlined in my earlier posts. Specifically:
- we believe it is worth maintaining the old tradition in which the givens of the natural world are treated as commons, and therefore not available for private ownership;
- we believe that commerce itself will flourish if certain broad and basic areas are left as common holdings, and that the genome is one of these;
- we believe that scientific inquiry into areas as large and complex as the genome is best organized through common property regimes;
- we believe that with something as complex and basic as the genome it is better to have the open-ended exploration of pure science than the goal-oriented exploitation of commercial science.
There are two core values in this list, two “goods.” One arises from an old resistance to giving anyone a monopoly power when it comes to the givens of this world, the laws and facts of nature. The other asserts an ideal of scientific inquiry, that it be open-ended and communal. Commercializing the human genome corrupts these values; treating it as sacred preserves them.
***
Lewis Hyde is Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College. He is writing a book in defense of “cultural commons.”