The book On Immunity: an innoculation quotes Haraway saying, "We are bound, in this world, to both nature and technology. We are all cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras." She captures the importance of the cooperation between machines and humans, and the importance of maintaining this relationship. Current medical technology allows us to transfer blood, and even organs, from one person to another, as well as using vaccines to protect against deadly diseases. Without these innovations, many more people would be suffering, or have lost their lives as a result. However, each innovation is still met with backlash.
Without fail, every time a new technology or technique is developed, the morality of it is questioned. People are quick to discredit innovation and fall back on what is comfortable for them, but if nothing is ever challenged or pushed, change will never happen. Even after a new technique or technology becomes mainstream, as soon as there is a chance for it to be discredited, the information spreads like wildfire. As soon as Wakefield made the claim that autism was caused by the measles vaccine, there was a significant drop in the amount of parents vaccinating their children, even though the claim was disproved over and over again. People are quick to mistrust anything that can be seen as "unnatural," and easiest target is often vaccinations. This is because vaccinations do not work 100% of the time, and sometimes even have side effects. However, to looking at just one case fails to capture the holistic impact of vaccinations. Vaccinating your child does not ensure they will never contract the disease, but it means that if there was to be an outbreak, your child would be part of the solution, helping make it harder for the disease to spread.
Once trust in technology and new medical practices is developed, nature and technology will become more linked. Harway "envisions a cyborg world in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints." If this point is reached, we will be able to develop innovation at a much quicker pace. However, this is not to say that we should proceed without precaution. There should be a distinction between precaution and paranoia. Precaution keeps innovation in check and ensures that we do not progress at too rapidly, putting new technology into practice before it is fully tested. In contrast, paranoia causes us to take steps back, such as when measles reappeared because a an unfounded claim about the correlation between the measles vaccine and autism was made. To progress, we must establish a trust in technology checked only by precaution, not paranoia.
References:
Biss, E. (2015). On immunity: an inoculation. Minneapolis, MN: Greywolf.
It's astonishing how one negative claim/report can impact the views of millions of people. For example, Wakefield's claim that autism was caused by the measles vaccine, which you mentioned in your post. I liked your perspective on advancing technology regarding precaution and paranoia. Using precaution will allow for technology to keep advancing and improving while lowering the risk of adverse effects. Paranoia will almost always hinder the advancements of technology.
ReplyDeleteI liked the distinction you made between precaution and paranoia. This shows that futuristic thinking can be tempered by the past without being overwhelmed by it. This idea I think would be greatly beneficial to the scientific community if it could be wholly accepted by the public.
ReplyDeleteGreat post! I like that you broke down why the morality of technology is questioned. A similar example of a technology going mainstream and being easily discredited by false claims is that of GMOs. GMO's have so much research behind them showing them to be safe, but one, unreproducible study came out, and pictures of mice with large tumors slandered GMOs. Somehow people still think they are dangerous to human health, just like vaccinations.
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