Genomics beyond Health
Applying behavioural genetics to public policy will be hard — but not impossible.
Earlier this year, the UK government published; “Genomics Beyond Health”. The intention is to stimulate discussion about use use of genomic and genetics in public policy areas like education and criminal justice. It’s a useful and perhaps even important contribution to an already growing debate.
Ethical and technical issues around the application of genetic science to policy abound. Yet when it comes to health, predicting people’s predisposition to particular adverse conditions in order to ameliorate or even prevent such conditions in advance is generally viewed as a good thing.
Predicting people’s likelihood of becoming a criminal, or of being a poor scholar, is far trickier for policymakers. Stigmatisation is a clear risk. Do societies want to risk exposing genetic variation amongst socially constructed groups and building it into how we provide social services?
While some outcomes may seem unlikely, we simply cannot know the risks implied by any putative policy until they are researched; and if we don’t know the risks then then these ideas can’t become policy.
In her popular science book The Genetic Lottery, Professor Kathryn Paige Harden writes that our commitment to anti-racism cannot be stable unless we accept the possibility of a genetic cause of white IQ superiority over black. This follows the well-known line of argument of leading Harvard geneticist Professor David Reich.
“If we are to make our commitment to antiracism stable in a post-genomic world, I think it is necessary, however unpalatable, to consider Reich’s question about how we should prepare for scientific discoveries, whatever they might be. Let us not flinch from considering what seems like the worst-case scenario: what if, next year, there suddenly emerged scientific evidence showing that European ancestry populations evolved in ways that made them genetically more prone, on average, to develop cognitive abilities of the sort that earn high tests in school? How would we “absorb” that fact? Reich answered his question with a plea to ‘treat each human being as an individual’ and ‘accord [each person] the same freedoms and opportunities regardless of those differences” (p.90–91).
This is dangerous terrain indeed for policymakers.
The simple fact is that at present we have too little knowledge of how heredity interacts with the environment to create lived, phenotypic traits to make real headway in respect of genetics and social policy. Ideas like plasticity and epigentetics are in the very early stages of exploration. And researchers must progress with great sensitivity.
Yet while it is hard to see early scope for applying behavioural genetics wholesale to general education, say, there are areas of policy which might hint at more promise.
A holy grail of the criminal justice system, for example, is reducing re-offending. People already convicted of a serious offence are already — justifiably most would say — stigmatised. Yet providing scope for a clean slate through court-ordered programmes, and thereby reducing the risk of re-offending to the wider public, is something pretty much everyone supports.
Court-ordered programmes are based on actuarial risk, however; they are one-size-fits-all. This means that their success rate can be very low. Might genetics help personalise the selection for and content of such programmes in a cost effective way which properly helps reduce re-offending? Very possibly.
This is some potentially very useful research in this area already. It’s well worth keeping an eye on. To my mind, as a former offender and legislator, and as someone interested in helping reducing the risk of re-offending to all citizens, this seems to me where the benefits of genomics beyond health is likely to come first.
