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Icelanders as Subjects of Science

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Foucault and the Human Subject of Science

Part of the book series: SpringerBriefs in Ethics ((BRIEFSETHIC))

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Abstract

In this chapter I discuss plans that were made in Iceland to establish a database with health, genetic and genealogical data for the entire nation. I first describe these plans in some detail and then discuss their relation to the discredited eugenics discourse and how that discourse together with the promises of a genetics revolution was deployed to produce a docile research population. In this case the Foucauldian biopolitics of the population is concentrated on a population of a single nation as a research population, for the benefit of science and the economy.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Parts of this chapter, in particular from Sects. 5.3 and 5.4, have appeared in the book chapter “Interbreeding within the Icelandic population is high compared to that of mice or fruit-flies” (Árnason 2004). I thank the University of Iceland Press/Háskólaútgáfan for the permission to reprint material from that chapter.

  2. 2.

    For a discussion of these issues, in particular the first three, see McInnis (1999), Chadwick (1999), and Häyry et al. (2007).

  3. 3.

    IFCC is the International Federation of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine; Roche is Roche Diagnostics, a Hoffman-La Roche subsidiary.

  4. 4.

    Daniel J. Kevles has done more than most to remind us of the eugenic inheritance of human genetics, for instance in his book In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Kevles 1985); but see also Kevles (1992) and Kevles (1999).

  5. 5.

    The following discussion is largely based on four studies: Kevles (1992), Kevles (1999), Karlsdóttir (1998a b). There is no lack of literature on the history of eugenics, good examples include Bashford and Levine (2010), Adam (1990), Paul (1995), and, with the focus on the German context, Weikart (2004).

  6. 6.

    Plato lays out his plans in book V of the Republic, see in particular 459A–461B.

  7. 7.

    For more about Karl Pearson and the history of statistics see Hacking (1990).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Ethics and History of Medicine, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany

    Garðar Árnason

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Árnason, G. (2018). Icelanders as Subjects of Science. In: Foucault and the Human Subject of Science. SpringerBriefs in Ethics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02813-8_5

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