Ethical, societal implications of genome-wide behavioral, brain-related traits
nature.com
nature.com
" Ethical issues in research projects are overseen by IRBs, which mandate that a full research proposal must be submitted, evaluated and approved before the start of any project. Such a research proposal typically contains both scientific and ethical components. But these protocols rarely consider possible negative impacts on society and how these can be mitigated, and we argue that this should be added. Such a mitigation plan can include how researchers plan to translate research findings to a lay audience, how they plan to prevent or discourage commercial companies from misusing results, and how to aim to decrease the likelihood of misappropriation of results.
We propose six practical action items that can be included in such a mitigation plan:
1. Include a bioethical expert in all stages of a GWAS study: ...
2. Include relevant patient groups or social communities: ...
3. Explicitly state how the results should not be used or interpreted: ...
4. Prevent unethical usage without explicit permission: Most GWAS researchers strongly advocate the public sharing and direct download of GWAS results without going through a committee for approval. This stimulates scientific advancement and is in line with an open science policy. However, the downside of this is that uses of GWAS results are not registered and therefore possible unintended uses are not easily detected. The only way to prevent unethical use of GWAS results by other researchers or commercial parties is to only allow access after approval from the principal investigator, or a data access committee. As long as summary statistics are directly downloadable it is difficult to prevent misuse by other researchers or non-commercial parties. However, misuse by commercial companies can be discouraged by adding a so-called Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Such a license can be accompanied by a statement that mentions that commercial use may be possible after obtaining permission from the principal investigator. This would still allow for ethical commercial uses, such as the development of novel drugs based on GWAS results.
5. Disseminate GWAS findings to the general public: ...
6. Track online discussion of results: Keep track of where results are being discussed. ... "
I don't think I like that take. Attempts to restrict the spread of knowledge usually don't work long-term, and often result in bad actors working in secret. Some proposals relating to AI recently have had similar traits.
"5. Disseminate GWAS findings to the general public"
the 4th point is the only one that concerns limiting usage, and that clearly suggests researchers may seek to to prevent commercial use of their results unless the commercial use is vetted and useful.
The bigger problem with this approach is that it’s simply not science. Science doesn’t involve prescribing a correct “ethical” interpretation of your research findings. Science doesn’t involve cultural and ethical overseers ensuring that your findings fit within some moral framework. What happens when the findings themselves are deemed unethical? They will be withheld from publication? They will be used to influence public policy without any opportunity for public scrutiny? They will have a correct interpretation prescribed for them that caries the weight of scientific fact?
If I convinced an ethics committee that locality violations were unethical, it would not be science for me to publish research that said my findings could not possibly be used to support quantum non-locality, or that my findings don’t actually reveal locality violations for ethical reasons, and that this interpretation is the only scientifically correct one. Using ethics to define an experiment is one thing, but involving ethical considerations in the research process, and the interpretation of your findings is simply anti-scientific.
Bio-ethics job-security strokes again. Provide literally 0 value or solutions other than spitting verbage over the research and increasing the barrier to entry for small labs, so only the giant labs can afford the bureaucracy.
No thanks!
Or, as the OSS community likes to say, "fork it". Surely there are enough against the current mainstream ideology to start their own side.
The studies were a little shocking at first, but really it's more surprising to me how much neurotic anxiety people have over the valuable insights in these studies. Insights that, by the way, were first discovered by cavemen in India 10,000 years ago and used it to build the first successful societies by distributing labor fairly based on these exact same brain/body types that just some guy found running a k-means on genomes and MMPI-2 answers. And these societies were pretty successful until they were taken over by people that didn't get it.
One such is here: https://u.osu.edu/cs1100sp21fechtel/2021/02/05/context-resea...
As a "mutt" with some German ancestry, some Jewish ancestry, some colonizer ancestors, some colonized ancestors, some who fled, some who dominated, I've thought long and hard about these topics, about what happened last century. I'm neurotic for good reason. Because there's danger here, especially in being overly confident about any single totalizing framework.
I've been told I shouldn't dance because of how I look. But then when I kept dancing anyway, others affirmed me and my rhythm. Who was right?
Guess I can relate to this guy: https://youtu.be/XGMIEDlOT_I
The omnigenic model suggests that even when there are observable genetic associations, they're probably very dynamic.
Who among us has the wisdom and authority to tell an individual exactly where they belong, where they fit, how they fit, what path to choose? A brand new individual whose genetic combinations and environmental context have never been seen before? A whole new being in an ever-emerging world?
Especially in times of upheaval and shifts I believe we need to keep our minds and hearts open.
I agree with you that new tools could provide insight and benefit, but there's ridiculous potential for abuse, for rationalizing and normalizing collective habits of domination old and new, for reinforcement of stereotypes and limiting beliefs.
This also makes my blood boil, should we share so much in common somehow.
Race (still) has nothing to do with any of the GWAS studies, and this has been discussed in length since far before we started hooking up supercomputers to personality studies. These are discussing large differences in the chemical computers in our body that take possibly 100's of times or more longer to evolve than the amount of melanin in your skin or the shape of your nose would have evolved, and have evidently stayed that way for several 100's of thousands of years due to assortative mating.
So, given how literally every society ever tested all the way down to remote African tribes has all this exact same genetic diversity, would it not imply that this exact same distributed diversity is necessary for a healthy society to function?
Is it too difficult to imagine that certain groups of people, who we can't just use our eyes to pick out, are at greater risk from, say, macroeconomic shifts, which hampers their ability to be efficacious and extract favorable outcomes from the environment, has consequences even to certain groups that have it good?
Seems unbelievably great that we have all the data to prove all these emotionally dysregulated and life-hating schizoid racists wrong and be able to better labor distribution to improve individual and societal efficacy, but some anxieties are holding it back?
Here's an idea, you can easily prove the genetic determinism believers wrong by maintaining healthy boundaries and not internalizing other people's own self-destructive issues >:)
As per usual, we'll do it in that beautifully painful messy human way.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=%22posthuma+d%22
As someone familiar with the the mechanics I have to say I have no satisfactory answers.