[For the last two years, the Sanger Institute has been running a series of events looking at the relationship between society and personal genomics. This is a report on our most recent event, a debate on celebrity genomes between two campus faculty. In addition to the live debate and in-house questions, we also took comments on Twitter with the #CelebGenomes tag.]
In the second campus debate on “Society and the personal genome” Ewan Birney (proponent) and Paul Flicek (opponent) went head to head to debate the motion: “This House believes that celebrity genomes are a useful contribution to science and society”. The debate was well attended, with standing room only in the 150-seat lecture theatre. Prior to commencing the debate, Jeff (as Chair) took a poll of the audience, finding an even split among those who agreed (30%), disagreed (38%) and were undecided (32%). The same result was obtained using both high-tech interactive voting keypads and the more traditional method of estimating the decibels of a shouting crowd.
Opening arguments
Ewan opened by highlighting the two points of argument in this debate: 1) are celebrity genomes useful to science and 2) are they useful to society? He argued in response to the first question that famous genomes such as Desmond Tutu, James Watson and Craig Venter have already been used and widely cited in scientific research. To answer the second, he argued that for science to be useful for society, however, there needs to be a dialog between science and society. Society needs a narrative to understand the science, and celebrities are often where society turns for these stories. We need more people of every kind to talk about their genomes but the people that other people will notice are the celebrities.
In his opening argument, Paul made an important distinction between the genomes of “celebrity scientists” (James Watson, Craig Venter), and the genomes of popular celebrities (Simon Cowell, Ozzy Osbourne). The former may be well known in the scientific community, but if we are talking about “celebrity genomes”, we should really be talking about people who a significant proportion of the population know about. And the issue with these celebrities is that their genomes, and the insights they have into their genomes, are not more important than for any non-celebrity. He contrasted celebrity genomes with the example of Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s activism: Fox is a good celebrity advocate because of the unique insights that come from suffering from a condition that most people do not have, but everyone has a genome, so what makes celebrities more qualified to speak about genomics? Especially when we know celebrities are often terrible at communicating science to the public, as illustrated by an example of reality TV-star Nicole ‘Snooki’ Polizzi from the Jersey Shore who thinks the ocean is salty due to whale sperm.
Andrew Miller “Do A-listers have more A bases? #CelebGenomes”
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