MUTATING CONCEPTS, EVOLVING DISCIPLINES: GENETICS, MEDICINE, AND SOCIETY Philosophy and Medicine VOLUME 75 Founding Co-Editor Stuart F. Spicker Editor H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., Department of Philosophy. Rice University. and Baylor College of Medicine. Houston. Texas Associate Editor Kevin Wm. Wildes. SJ., Department of Philosophy and Kennedy Institute of Ethics. Georgetown University. Washington. D.C. Editorial Board George J. Agich, Department of Bioethics. The Cleveland Clinic Foundation. Cleveland. Ohio Nicholas Capaldi, Department of Philosophy. University of Tulsa. Tulsa. Oklahoma Edmund Erde, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. Stratford. New Jersey Eric T. Juengst, Center for Biomedical Ethics. Case Western Reserve University. Cleveland. Ohio Christopher Tollefsen, Department of Philosophy. University ofS outh Carolina. Columbia. South Carolina Becky White, Department of Philosophy. California State University. Chico. California The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume MUTATING CONCEPTS, EVOLVING DISCIPLINES: GENETICS, MEDICINE, ANDSOCIETY Editedby USA S. PARKER Associate Professor ofH urrwn Genetics and Director of Graduate Education of the Center for Bioethics and Health Law, University ofP ittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. and RACHEL A. ANKENY Lecturer and Director, Unit for History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney, Australia Sp ringer-Science+ Business Media, B. V, A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-94-010-3959-8 ISBN 978-94-010-0269-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-010-0269-1 Printed an acid-free paper AII Rights Reserved © 2002 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2002 Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover Ist edition 2002 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. L.s.P. To David R.A.A. To G.D.A., not for her genes but for her love and support TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Chapter 1: LISA S. PARKER AND RACHEL A. ANKENY / Introduction PART ONE: HISTORICAL REFLECTIONS ON CORE CONCEPTS Chapter 2: GARLAND E. ALLEN / The Classical Gene: Its Nature and Its Legacy 11 Chapter 3: DOUGLAS ALLCHIN / Dissolving Dominance 43 Chapter 4: MANFRED D. LAUBICHLER AND SAHOTRA SARKAR / Flies, Genes, and Brains: Oskar Vogt, Nicolai Timofeeff-Ressovsky, and the Origin of the Concepts ofPenetrance and Expressivity 63 Chapter 5: DIANE PAUL / From Reproductive Responsibility to Reproductive Autonomy 87 PART TWO: PERSPECTIVES FROM THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Chapter 6: FRED GIFFORD / Understanding Genetic Causation and Its Implications for Ethical Issues Concerning Medical Genetics 109 Chapter 7: RACHEL A. ANKENY / Reduction Reconceptualized: Cystic Fibrosis as a Paradigm Case for Molecular Medicine 127 Chapter 8: JOSEPH L. GRAVES, JR. / Scylla and Charybdis: Adaptationism, Reductionism, and the Fallacy of Equating Race with Disease 143 Chapter 9: HELEN E. LONGINO / Behavior as Affliction: Common Frameworks of Behavior Genetics and Its Rivals 165 PART THREE: EXPLORATIONS OF ETHICAL, SOCIAL, AND LEGAL CONSEQUENCES Chapter 10: LICIA CARLSON / The Morality of Prenatal Testing and Selective Abortion: Clarifying the Expressivist Objection 191 Chapter 11 : ANITA SILVERS / Meliorism at the Millennium: Positive Molecular Eugenics and the Promise of Progress without Excess 215 Chapter 12: DAVID WASSERMAN / Personal Identity and the Moral Appraisal of Prenatal Therapy 235 Chapter 13: PAUL K. J. HAN / Conceptual and Moral Problems of Genetic and Non-Genetic Preventive Interventions 265 Vll Vlll Chapter 14: JOHN H. ROBINSON AND ROBERTA M. BERRY / Umaveling the Codes: The Dialectic between Knowledge of the Moral Person and Knowledge of the Genetic Person in Criminal Law 287 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 319 INDEX 321 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS R.A.A. would like to thank Jason Tong, Research Assistant of the Unit for History and Philosophy of Science at University of Sydney, for his assistance, particularly on the index; Nicolas Rasmussen for informal advice and constant support; and contributors to this volume for their patience and perseverance. L.S.P. would also like to thank our contributors, as well as Ryan Sauder, University of Pittsburgh, for his insightful assistance in editing the volume and index; Karen Ferris, University of Pittsburgh, for her meticulous preparation of individual manuscripts; Lisa Keranen, University of Pittsburgh, for her research assistance; Lisa Rasmussen, for her editorial and moral support, as well as her work formatting the final volume; and David Sogg for his encouragement and his proofreading assistance, in two languages. ix CHAPTER 1 LISA S. PARKER AND RACHEL A. ANKENY INTRODUCTION The year 2000 marked what is now being called "the century of the gene" (Keller, 2000), and 2003 will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the "discovery" of the double helix. One hundred years after the so-called rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's laws of inheritance, the science of genetics has developed to the point where a working draft of the entire sequence of the human genome is now available. These advances have brought with them numerous challenges and opportunities related to our understanding of genetics and its relation to medicine, ethics, and broader social practices and institutions. Scholarly and popular literature addressing these issues has burgeoned, with numerous important contributions being made to the history of the gene (e.g., Keller, 2000; Morange, 2001) and to our philosophical understanding of the gene concept (e.g., Beurton, Falk, and Rheinberger, 2000), as well as to continued exploration of ethical implications of this new genetic age (e.g., to name just two, Buchanan et al., 2000; Andrews, 2001). These dialogues have occurred somewhat in isolation from each other, however, without much explicit effort to juxtapose historical, conceptual, and ethical analyses of the ever-mutating concept of the gene and related topics, or to examine the influence these analyses exert on the disciplines, fields, and sectors of science and society likely to be affected by these changing concepts. Our intent in crafting this collection was to reflect the spirit of the series in philosophy and medicine to which it belongs; in particular, we have interpreted in a broad way that which counts as a philosophical contribution to the understanding of medicine with the hope of continuing and reinvigorating productive communication among the many constitutive subdisciplines of philosophy and medicine. With examination of the evolution of concepts related to medical genetics as its centerpiece, this volume also reflects our desire, as teacher-scholars working in interdisciplinary settings, to prompt more dialogue between scholars working in the L.S. Parker and R.A. Ankeny (eds.), Mutating Concepts, Evolving Disciplines: Genetics, Medicine and Society, 1-7. © 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. 2 LISA S. PARKER AND RACHEL A. ANKENY history and philosophy of biomedical sciences and in bioethics and to provide additional cross-disciplinary teaching resource materials. The collection's first section, which is primarily historical, focuses on key concepts in human genetics and on their origins; hence it engages deep epistemological issues. Garland Allen's contribution provides the backdrop for many of the subsequent chapters by its exploration of the development of the classical gene-or what he argues should be more appropriately considered to be the 'derived Mendelian' gene-from the rediscovery of Mendel's work in 1900 through the mid-1930s. He denies that this concept of the gene has been abandoned, and argues that today's gene concept is still dominated by these classical concerns, largely as promoted in textbooks and popular literature. He traces the roots of the classical gene concept to the historical development of biology as a discipline seeking to emulate physics and chemistry and to the influence of mechanistic materialism on the development of genetics as a separate discipline. Douglas Allchin provides a more explicitly negative assessment of the impact of supposedly Mendelian concepts on current-day genetics, arguing forcefully in favor of eliminating the concept of dominance. The concept, he claims, is inessential to genetics and misleading in terms of heredity, natural selection, and various molecular and cellular processes. Since clearer language is available to us, we should avail ourselves of it. His examination of key disease concepts in molecular genetics reveals that the concept of dominance has come undone, even at the basic level of classical genetics where it might have been thought to still have force. Allen and Allchin's chapters complement each other strongly, and should be of interest not only to historians of biology, but to anyone who is tempted to continue to use the classical gene concept in teaching or scholarship. Manfred D. Laubichler and Sahotra Sarkar explore the intellectual history and current social context of the genetic concepts of penetrance and expressivity. In an account with many unexpected historical twists, they argue that the introduction of these terms was motivated by the interaction of research programs in human neuroanatomy and in the evolutionary genetics of fruitflies, together with a project to establish the source of the genius embodied in V.1. Lenin's preserved brain. Their examination reveals that the vision of the discipline of neurobiology endorsed by particular scientists at the time made it inevitable that these two fields would intersect, despite their apparent incongruity. In addition, pursuing the theme introduced by Allen and Allchin-the problematic nature of long-standing concepts in genetics-Laubichler and Sarkar discuss 'penetrance' in contemporary human behavioral genetics, in light of the influence of ideological factors as well as conceptual considerations. As they put it, our post-Human Genome Project era is powered by an atmosphere of 'geneticism,' or what elsewhere has been termed 'geneticization' (Hubbard, 1990; Lippman, 1991, esp. pp. 18-19; Wolf, 1995): there is now a gene for everything. 'Penetrance' serves to mask the difficulties in maintaining this claim, much as Allchin argues the concept of dominance serves to obscure the biological details inherent in current-day medical genetics.