{"id":46047,"date":"2011-10-01T23:58:39","date_gmt":"2011-10-02T07:58:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=14052"},"modified":"2011-10-01T23:58:39","modified_gmt":"2011-10-02T07:58:39","slug":"decency-not-by-law-alone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2011\/10\/01\/decency-not-by-law-alone\/","title":{"rendered":"Decency not by law alone"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/2011\/09\/all-you-genes-belong-the-tribal-council\/#comment-92667\">Rasmus Nielsen<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/GeneExpressionBlog\/~3\/R8VyWDLjJYE\/\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/2011\/09\/all-you-genes-belong-the-tribal-council\/#comment-92667\"\">has a long response below<\/a> to the issue of the getting some sort of consent from Aboriginals in the local region in regards to a specimen from a deceased individual. He <a href=\"http:\/\/cteg.berkeley.edu\/~nielsen\/2011\/do-the-genes-belong-to-the-tribal-council\/\">has a full entry on this <\/a> at the <a href=\"http:\/\/cteg.berkeley.edu\/~nielsen\/blog\/\">new weblog<\/a> of his research group. <\/p>\n<p><span id=\"more-14052\"><\/span><br \/>\nAs an aside, let me say that it is heartening to see such an eminent young scientist put up an initial post where he forthrightly states that &#8220;We will use this space to spread our opinions about the state of affairs in evolutionary genomics.  <b>If you disagree with us \u2013 leave a comment.<\/b>&#8221; This makes me less skeptical of the medium term future which <a href=\"http:\/\/www.genomesunzipped.org\/2011\/07\/why-publish-science-in-peer-reviewed-journals.php\">Joe Pickrell outlined<\/a> last summer in relation to peer review. More specifically in this case it would be interesting to see what exchanges, disagreements, and agreements, the authors of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencemag.org\/content\/early\/2011\/09\/21\/science.1211177\">Science<\/a> Aboriginal genomics paper had with the authors of the broader Denisovan admixture paper in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cell.com\/AJHG\/abstract\/S0002-9297(11)00395-8\">The American Journal of Human Genetics<\/a>. My friends at <a href=\"http:\/\/ib.berkeley.edu\/\">IB<\/a> surely know if there was any such exchange, but it feels kind of lame asking people for possible personal communication constantly.<\/p>\n<p>Going back to Nielsen&#8217;s post he contends that it would be the &#8220;nice thing&#8221; for him to do to consult his sibling if he was going to disclose genetic information which might have broader impact upon him (in this case, the potential presence of a gene predisposing someone to Alzheimer&#8217;s). I think that&#8217;s key: <b>I don&#8217;t have much of an issue with scientists who follow their conscience, and try to be decent human beings.<\/b> Scientists are people too; not just analytic computation machines. The problem is when a legal framework emerges which regulates what science is, and isn&#8217;t, done. Obviously at the boundary I totally agree with the idea that science has some ethical constraints. We wouldn&#8217;t want a thousand Mengele&#8217;s to bloom. But I think the <b>legal threshold<\/b> should be set rather high. If governmental bodies begin to regulate the bounds of scientific inquiry at a fine-grained level that&#8217;s a pretty strong incentive for aspiring <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Leon_Kass\">Leon Kass&#8217;<\/a> to take over such agencies.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/GeneExpressionBlog\/~4\/R8VyWDLjJYE\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Rasmus Nielsen has a long response below to the issue of the getting some sort of consent from Aboriginals in the local region in regards to a specimen from a deceased individual. He has a full entry on this at the new weblog of his research group. As an aside, let me say that it [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,82,481,525],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46047","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-genetics","category-genomics","category-human-genetics","category-human-genomics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46047","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46047"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46047\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46179,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46047\/revisions\/46179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}