When Henry Greely is perplexed or troubled, his body English tells you as clearly as his words: the Stanford law professor and bioethicist leans back in his chair, stares into the middle distance, and slowly, absently tousles his own hair.
In his modest office this morning he's discussing the challenges of his two-year stint as one of the bioethicists on the organizing committee of the North American arm of the Human Genome Diversity Project. ("Has it only been since '92?" he wonders aloud. "It feels longer.") After two and a half hours spent grappling with variations on a single theme-- "Why are some people so mad about the Human Genome Diversity Project?"-- Greely's hair is decidedly the worse for wear.
That it should upset people seems curious. On paper, which is really the only place it exists so far, the project appears to be a singularly uncontroversial idea. It is merely a call for a coordinated effort by scientists on every continent to record the dwindling regional genetic diversity of Homo sapiens by taking DNA samples from several hundred distinct human populations and storing the samples in gene banks. Researchers could then examine the DNA for clues to the evolutionary histories of the populations and to their resistance or susceptibility to particular diseases.
Yet today the architects of the three-year-old program--a group of geneticists and anthropologists with irreproachable academic and political credentials--stand accused of being neocolonialists, gene pirates, and pawns in a conspiracy to develop race-specific biological weapons. The atmosphere surrounding the work is thick with suspicion: Greely recently heard one rumor about a medical researcher whose ongoing study in the Caribbean was abruptly shut down by charges that he would use his subjects' blood samples to clone a race of slaves. "Obviously Jurassic Park didn't help us," Greely says, managing a wan smile.
Clearly, though, reaction to the diversity project far exceeds mere blockbuster-induced paranoia about the perils of genetic engineering. University professors and indigenous peoples alike are voicing objections, and while the academic critique tends to be less vivid than what appears in the popular press, racism is the shared subtext. Is the Human Genome Diversity Project scientific colonialism, using the genes of Third World people to answer obscure academic questions or--worse--provide expensive medical cures for the privileged citizens of the developed world? Might it backfire and inadvertently supply more fodder for ethnic battles, as if any more fodder were needed? Or are its organizers merely victims of bad timing? Are the 1990s an impossible moment in human history to launch a project touching two of the rawest nerves in the culture: genes and race?
