The Boston Globe has a good article up right now on the work being done disentangling our human DNA and the implications of all that. The article is mainly about how the new knowledge and the differences being found among racial DNAs and intelligence potential may feed greater discrimination. But much of the article can be read in light of the possibilities of TECHNOCORRECTIONS and bioengineering that we discuss here as researchers pinpoint genes that affect neurochemicals, dispositions, and structured behavior, including criminal behavior. The best part of the article comes in the warnings which will definitely apply to what we do in corrections sentencing:
"We are living through an era of the ascendance of biology, and we have to be very careful," said Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. "We will all be walking a fine line between using biology and allowing it to be abused."
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But many geneticists, wary of fueling discrimination and worried that speaking openly about race could endanger support for their research, are loath to discuss the social implications of their findings. Still, some acknowledge that as their data are extended to nonmedical traits, the field has reached what one researcher recently called "a very delicate time and a dangerous time."
Sunday, November 11, 2007
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