 already designed in scientific research, namely processes that are conceived to serve people but do not include diverse perspectives in their planning and incubation and that perpetuate systemic racism. She has published several articles in peer-reviewed journals and is the author of two books, People's Science, Bodies and Rights on the STEM Self-Frontier, and Race After Technology. She's also the editor of Captivating Technology, Race, Technoscience and the Carceral Imagination. Her most recent project, Provincializing Science, Mapping and Marketing Difference After the Genome, explores genomics in South Africa, India and the United States with a focus on how and why racial ethnic and case category are incorporated in research on health disparity. Please join me in welcoming Professor Ruat Benjamin. Good morning, everyone, faculty, students, staff and community members. What an honor to be here with you today. Thank you to all the organizers and individuals working behind the scenes for two years to make this conference possible. What an incredible undertaking. So let's begin by reflecting on what's at stake here. In my view, the reason that questions we're going to wrestle with over the next two days are so pressing is because how we understand both reproduction and technology really gets to the heart of who and what are valued in our society. In conventional thinking, it's easy to become enamored by all that's shiny and shocking with respect to novel technologies, leading us to overlook older and unresolved issues having to do with which lives are deemed worth living in the first place. How we think about reproduction, I want to suggest, has implications for all other arenas of social life and public policy, whether we're talking about housing, food, education, or employment. Because essentially, in thinking about reproduction, we're setting the terms for who we're willing to invest in and who is deemed disposable. This is a conversation, then, that implicates every single one of us. And frankly, it's too important to leave to the experts a point I unpack in my book People's Science. In addition to broadening who, we also have to expand what we talk about, widening our lens beyond the lab to reflect on how novel technologies relate to the many different kinds of tools and techniques that shape our potential to live and thrive as human beings. Another way to think about it is this. Water, food, education, basic health care, these are all, in some ways, tools of reproduction. After all, they impact our life chances in profound and profoundly unequal ways. Which is why I don't think we can afford to limit our discussion only to those high tech procedures that make all the headlines when our life chances are impacted by a much wider set of variables. So if you'll join me, what I'd like to do is experiment, starting beyond the lab and expansive starting point by first challenging some fundamental binaries that can easily dampen our analysis. Low versus high tech, mundane versus novel, social versus individual prerogatives, political versus ethical interventions, it's really tempting in conversations such as this to stick to the right side of the screen without fully wrestling with those questions and concerns that would seem to fall on the left. Instead of binaries, I'd like us to think about the relationship between these units of analysis as more of a continuum. This shift in orientation prompts us to think about how something like engineering human genomes is related to the engineering of municipal water systems, which is connected to the engineering of tax codes, which is linked to the engineering of racially segregated neighborhoods. Engineering at its essence means to work artfully to bring something about. And the fact is there is nothing intrinsically good about the outcome of one's artful designs. Consider the following. The reason our nation is more racially segregated today than at the end of the Civil War is the outcome of very deliberate, strategic, even artful engineering on the part of the government and private citizens in the form of things like redlining, blockbusting, and racially restrictive covenants, all of which served to subsidize a white middle class while divesting from other groups. All these different forms of engineering, from public health to financial wealth, form the backdrop, the white noise, if you will, of reproductive technologies. We, as a species, are very adept at engineering inequity. And the default setting of biotechnology, then, is to reproduce the status quo. But it doesn't have to be the case. The question we have to ask ourselves is this. Can we channel our tool making prowess as a species to artfully work towards a more just, more equitable future where the life of that girl child, that poor infant, that disabled kid, that black baby are truly valued and nurtured? I'm not talking here about celebrating diversity as kind of feel good rhetoric and lip service, but truly valued in the hidden corners of our social life and the fine print of our public policies. It's the difference between diverse as a kind of photo op for university websites and then what's actually included in our core curriculums, whose histories, cultures and insights take up intellectual space, which connects to the question of who ultimately gets a say in what ends up being researched and funded. Too often, these decision-making structures mirror the social structures that reproduce outmoded hierarchies. But again, this doesn't have to be the case. Before I share a few ideas about how we can begin to develop a justice-oriented approach to reproductive technologies, I hope you won't mind if I take a couple narrative detours to share some experiences with you, mostly from my youth that pushed me down this path of thinking about the social dimensions of science and technology. The reason is I know there are a lot of brilliant young people in the house, and I want to encourage you to develop the tools to read your reality, because there are many things that you're already experiencing in your schools, your neighborhoods, and your online networks that can actually inform your future work and fuel your passions. Real life, in other words, is not something that you're preparing for at some later date. It's happening now all around you. So for detour number one, we're going to go to the South Pacific. When I was 15 years old, my family moved from Conway, South Carolina to Maduro, the capital of the Marshall Islands, so my parents could begin working with the Department of Education there. That's me in the white shirt on the far left throwing up a peace sign with some of my new friends from the neighborhood. For those of you who know a little something about this region, you know that it's not all peace signs and sand mandalas. Quite the opposite, in fact. The Marshall Islands was the site of U.S. nuclear testing from 1946 to 1958, 67 tests in all. By one calculation, if their combined explosive power was split evenly over that 12-year period, it would equal 1.6 Hiroshima-sized explosions per day. Just to say, the history there of militarism and imperialism continues to wreak havoc on the health of Marshallese. Burns that reach to the bone, cancers in the short and long term, and congenital disabilities that cause babies to die hours after birth. One report sums it up, quote, the Marshallese are convinced that there is sufficient evidence of intergenerational harm caused by radiation fallout. Now add to this the widespread displacement people have experienced first for the purposes of nuclear testing, and now as a function of ongoing U.S. military presence. When I had the chance to travel from Maduro to neighboring islands, I was struck by how crudely inequity was engineered, all in the name of progress. The two islands that made the biggest impression on me were Quajolin, a U.S. Army installation, and manufactured suburbia, which was occupied almost entirely by military personnel and their families who enjoyed golf courses, basking robins, and a yacht club, among other amenities. In the neighboring island, which you could actually see from Quajolin, called Ebi, were islanders who were forced off Quajolin to make room for the base, now reside in a crowded shanty town that's commonly known as the slum of the Pacific. Ebi residents require a special pass to travel to Quajolin for work, while others barely subsist off the small checks the U.S. government dispenses. Needless to say, people are suffering not only from the direct fallout of nuclear testing, but also because of the existing conditions of their present lives, evidenced most readily in the high rate of chronic and infectious diseases, including a TB rate that's 23 times that of the United States, and occasional outbreaks of cholera and dengue fever. Military technologies are, in this way, reproductive technologies, because they diminish the capacity of those who are its victims to thrive and propagate. Instead of throwing up peace signs on the beach, we see children here bearing themselves in a make-believe cemetery, a reminder of how their lives have been biologically engineered, not in a lab, but in contaminated environments where innovating bombs took precedence. In many ways, the Marshall Islands is a metaphor for modernity in which the health and well-being of some are predicated on the immiseration, even slow extermination of others. So for the second detour, we're going to go to Atlanta, Georgia, where I completed undergrad at Spelman College. For my honors thesis, I was trying to understand how large-scale processes like racism, sexism, and materialism get under people's skin and impact women's childbearing experiences. About midway through that project, I found myself interviewing a classmate who told me about how when she was 17 years old, she delivered her baby via C-section. And as she explained it to me, sometime during the process, the doctor turned to her mom and asked, matter of factly, while I have her open, should I just go ahead and tie her up? In other words, the doctor was proposing to sterilize my classmate without her consent because she was underage, and which she vehemently objected to. Keep in mind now, this was the late 1990s, not ancient history, a full 40 years after famed civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer told her own story about checking into Sunflower City Hospital to have a tumor removed and walking out with what she later called a Mississippi appendectomy. In her words, this is an unwanted, unrequested, and unwarranted hysterectomy routinely given to poor and unsuspecting black women, usually taking place postpartum like the young woman I interviewed for my thesis. It was during this undergrad research process that I started to understand that depending on your social status, one's reproductive capacity is either celebrated and encouraged or disparaged and repressed. And keep in mind, this is not the stuff of dusty archives that we solved with a passage of a few laws. Eugenic sensibilities and practices are still alive and well. In the last few years, in fact, the coercive sterilization of prisoners has come to light. As late as 2010, an investigative report of California prisons revealed this trend. And just a few months ago in Tennessee, a judge granted shorter sentences for prisoners who agreed to be sterilized. None of this is happening in a vacuum. Positive eugenic practices that repress the reproduction of some are directly connected with seemingly more liberal, market-based, positive eugenic practices that encourage people to select the traits of their offspring, two sides of the same reproductive coin. Even together, these experiences and examples can help us understand the sociological principle of relationality, that nothing we analyze exists in a conceptual bubble, but is formed in relation to other processes. The tools that we design for reproduction are formed in connection to the techniques we employ for repression. Both are shaped by values and assumptions and often designed with particular beneficiaries or targets in mind. So let me just pause a moment on this idea of design. Because too often when we're thinking about the social dimensions of science and technology, we limit our conversation to who has access to this or that product or procedure. Instead, let's take a step back and examine where all these products and procedures come from in the first place. Often only a handful of people are really defining and designing the products and services that are then offered up for consumption. Being included in this sense is no straightforward good, especially when what we're being included in is shaped by bright and shiny eugenic imaginations. For that reason, I want to shift our attention to questions of design so that we can reflect on whose interests and values routinely get integrated in the artful engineering of techno science. A quick story to make this point, concrete. Now that I live in the northeast, I'm a Southern California kid, South Carolina kid. I'm now Boston, New Jersey. I jump at every opportunity to soak in sunshine when I'm traveling. So during a recent visit back to California, I ended up on this bench in Berkeley where I went to grad school, and it's next to one of my favorite outdoor markets. And I was hoping just to catch a few rays of sunshine, little vitamin D between meetings. But I quickly realized that I couldn't lie down on the bench because whoever designed it put arm rest dividers at regular intervals, and while there are a number of possible reasons why that might be, my first guess was this was an attempt to deter homeless people from using the bench to sleep. There's some cute little boutiques and antique stores right in front of it, so keep in mind this is the Bay Area where the booming tech industry has fueled a dreadful housing crisis, and whereby some counts more than one-third of school children in Silicon Valley are defined as homeless. And as it turns out with a little digging, I found that benches are only one part of a global phenomenon of discriminatory design. I came across single occupancy benches in Helsinki, no lying down there, caged benches in France. In this case, the people in the town were so angry that the city government had introduced these benches in 24 hours they banned together and had them removed, which can tell us something about how we can respond to discriminatory design. The best example I've come across though is this metered bench where the user actually has to pay to sit down. Don't get lost in your favorite book because you will be hurting. And while this particular design was originally created by a German artist to get us thinking about precisely these issues of the privatization of public life, different cities around the world have actually adopted it as a good way to deter what they consider loitering in public areas. As one government representative said with respect to so-called loiterers at bus stations, you're not a customer and our customers come first. A statement that would seem to sum up the ethos of many decisions and policies that govern public life. At the heart of discriminatory design is an attempt to create a technological fix for a social crisis, whether that crisis has to do with homelessness or health care, education or the environment, rather than address the underlying conditions that produce a problem. We design solutions that too often locate the problem inside kinds of people, like the so-called loiterer. From park bench to lab bench, the way that we frame questions, the places that we go looking for the answers, to the people we consult in the process are vital for us to reflect on. Who do we imagine will benefit from or get in the way of our designs? Because without thoughtful consideration, current forms of inequity based on class, race, ethnicity, gender, nationality and disability will be unwittingly or unwittingly built into the design of new tools and practices. This is why just focusing on access to reproductive technologies isn't enough. Instead, we have to think seriously about the design of research and development. Who does it? And with what guiding questions, assumptions and incentives? Let's take gene editing as an example and the pervasive assumptions about what needs editing and who benefits. In the words of Nobel Prize winning geneticist James Watson, from this perspective, seeing the bright side of being handicapped is like praising the virtues of extreme poverty. To be sure, there are many individuals who rise out of its inherently degrading states. But we perhaps most realistically should see it as the major origin of asocial behavior. I want to pause a moment and take issue with this phrase, inherently degrading states. Because much of the degradation that people with disabilities experience is not inherent, but as a result of how society actively degrades them. A more accurate reading of reality would recognize that far from being the origin of asocial behavior, as Watson mistakenly asserts, the disabled are forced to innovate new forms of sociality precisely because of the rampant ableism which he gives expression to here. In the time remaining then, I'd like to highlight a few ways we can begin to expand the conversation and deepen our thinking around science and technology to include questions and concerns of social justice. To that end, I'll briefly highlight five conceptual devices to put in the science and social justice toolkit. You can remember them with the sacronym, S-H-A-L-T, shouts, as in, thou shouts use these tools. The first device we need to sharpen is our social literacy, which is an ability to read reality beyond slogans, promises, and even policy changes, paying attention to the more mundane practices and norms that comprise everyday life. Social literacy reminds us that reforming policies and laws is not sufficient to shaping the context of science for the greater good, necessary but not sufficient. For example, the passage of the Genetic Non-Discrimination Act or GINA doesn't prevent employers and insurance companies from discriminating against you based on genetic predisposition to illness in the same way that other laws, when it comes to say employment and housing, haven't occurred discrimination in these arenas. To read reality accurately, we need to draw on the social sciences and humanities and not simply our own opinions and experiences of how things work. The second device in our science and social justice toolkit is historical literacy, which is an attempt to think carefully about the precedents and processes that shape reproductive technologies. Historical literacy ensures that we don't simply mimic the hyperbolic rhetoric of headlines, breakthrough, cutting edge, miraculous, which often lead us to overlook continuities as we train our attention on all that appears novel. The best science and technology is not simply forward-looking, but takes stock of what's come before, the good, the great, the bad, the ugly. For example, when I was working with a team of population genome researchers in South Africa, they didn't race ahead in the construction of the new national biobank. Instead, they started by consulting with indigenous communities who they hoped would participate. They learned about previous abuses where scientists from other countries came and took genetic samples and produced studies that the communities found harmful because their own aim was not to repeat the past. With scientists working to design research differently, with justice and equity in mind, we also have to appreciate the knowledge different communities have to offer. Historical literacy isn't just about understanding past harms, but also about engaging a wider array of insights that people have to offer about the body, health, and healing. The third tool we need to hone is analytic agility, which helps us to notice how and when things change. It challenges our tendency to assume that the way in which scientific harms got enacted in the past will take shape the same way today. Rather than look for state-sponsored eugenics as evidence of harmful practices, we would also pay attention to how market-logics put the responsibility of racial fitness in the hands of consumers, encouraging parents to design fitter, smarter, and more beautiful children. Whereas historical literacy helps us understand the continuities with the past, analytic agility trains our attention on discontinuities, the things that change, altering, and becoming mercurial. And often this is the liberal context by which individual choices reinforce oppressive hierarchies. The fourth device in our science and social justice toolkit is linguistic reflexivity, which focuses our attention on how language is itself value-laden. We begin to understand how the words we use and the framings we employ to discuss reproductive technologies are not neutral, but seated with particular perspectives. The word editing, for example, sounds benign and even beneficial. Whereas for those who've been the target of eugenic policies in the past and whose worth continues to be called into question today, so-called editing may be more akin to getting pushed through a shredding machine. Remember the idea of relationality, that reproduction and repression so often go hand in hand. The fifth and final tool I'll mention is technological humility, which allows us to perceive and challenge the widespread hubris and paternalism that can characterize the world of techno science. Hubris not only in terms of individual personalities, but also in the way that particular norms and assumptions can go unquestioned. For example, in debates around reproductive and genetic technologies, a bright line is often drawn between good forms of therapy, like curing sickle cell disease, and bad forms of enhancement, like selecting skin or eye color of a future child. As if this distinction between good and bad was clear cut and indisputable. Not only is the line porous, there's vigorous resistance on the part of many disability justice advocates who aren't interested in the cures that are promoted in their name. It's also the case that conditions like sickle cell disease that are often on the good therapy side of the line contain a recessive trait that actually confers some resistance to the much more widespread threat of malaria. It's possible that if people select against sickle cell traits, this would erode the protective function for which it evolved. Social humility alerts us not only to uncertainties and unintended consequences, but it also prompts us to imagine how, despite our best intentions, we can't predict or know everything. In moving forward then, I've outlined five conceptual devices that contribute to a science and social justice toolkit, which I hope you find useful. Remember, thou shalt use these tools in order to expand what and who you think of when it comes to reproductive technologies. Thinking from the social margins, I suggest, can often offer a powerful set of insights that those in the center are not often privy to. Imagining reproductive technologies as a deeply social enterprise, as we've done this morning, is the starting point for imagining what's possible at the nexus of biotechnology and democracy more broadly. In the process, one of the things we have to resist is the impulse to shrink our imaginations down to size. That's not realistic. That's too much to tackle. Are all forms of shrinkage that maintain the status quo. So if you don't remember anything else I've said, remember this. We have to fight for the ability to imagine the world that we want. In fact, I think of our collective imagination as a kind of battlefield. There are warring ideas defending and resisting outmoded forms of social organization and injustice. And if we're genuinely fed up with business as usual, the next step is to imagine and experiment with alternatives in and beyond the lab. Thank you for your attention this morning. Thank you very much, Dr. Benjamin. One of the features of our new technology is that it allows us to actually ask a poll question of the audience. And so if you would like to...