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Point Of View! with Barb Sumner Burstyn
Pre-Crime Detection. It’s not all sci-fi
- August 2002
 In
the new Tom Cruise movie Minority Report the police can predict
with chilling accuracy just who will commit future crimes. The
film is promoted as science fiction but if you look closely at
a new report just released covering a study of 442 Dunedin boys
over a period of 26 years you begin to wonder if the chill factor
is not just on the screen.
The British-New Zealand research team report they have found
a gene variation known as monoamine oxidase (MAOA) that signals
future anti-social behaviour. (NZ Herald 3.8.02). Claiming a world
breakthrough, the researchers say the gene, when combined with
childhood abuse, could lead to anti-social and violent adult behaviour.
But rather than suggesting the obvious: that the discovery could
be used to detect and prevent future criminals, the researchers
have instead put a non-threatening public spin on it, saying their
findings could be used to screen for people whose genes protect
them from the trauma of stress or tragedy, perhaps to recruit
them as police, firefighters or soldiers.
And we believe this? Maybe it’s unintentional; maybe the
researchers really do believe they are working to identify future
good guys, as if this new method for eliminating criminal propensity
from the populace were nothing more a benign recruiting tool.
But strip away the science from this finding and you still have
a group of Dunedin boys, many of whom were abused. Some of them
coped well with their abuse while others did not. Instead of addressing
the root problem; why children are abused and what we can do to
prevent it, the researchers have, by default, classified the less
resilient into a separate ‘pre-criminal’ class. So what
if, now they’ve found the key to violence, authorities will
use it to lock the doors on the lives of boys unlucky enough to
suffer bad parenting and bad genes?
Far-fetched? Look at what we’ve done with Ritalin. Without
consideration for the wider family dynamic Ritalin has become
the drug of choice for just about any kid whose anti-social exuberance
and lack of discipline disturbs those around them. Rather than
seeing their behaviour as a cry for help and a manifestation of
poor parenting they’re classified as maladaptive Attention
Deficit Disorder (ADD) sufferers in need of medicating. Stephen
Post makes the connection between Ritalin abuse and the potential
for similar misuse of the MAOA finding. He’s a professor
of bioethics at Case Western Reserve University and sees a danger
in using medical means to ‘treat’ those at risk. “Medication
often becomes a solution to what is fundamentally a social problem
on the parent-child axis,” he said recently.
But take out the dysfunctional family dynamic, combine the gene
discovery with our willingness to medicalise our problems, give
it all a legal twist and you’ve got a great defence for all
kinds of criminal activity. In the United States, lawyer Dan Summer
recently filed a motion to have his murdering client tested for
the gene. Although his request was denied he was hoping to argue
that MAOA was a mitigating factor, like a mental illness, maintaining
his client came from a long line of aggressive and anti-social
men, exactly the profile for a MAOA sufferer.
But perhaps I’m being completely paranoid and the release
of the MAOA findings is nothing more sinister than a PR push to
soften potential customers for future medication, in other words
a marketing campaign for a new pharmaceutical product. Ritalin
aside, the pharmaceutical landscape is littered with illnesses
created or hyped up to coincide with the release of a new drug.
Known as ‘corporate-sponsored disease awareness,’ the
technique was kicked off in 1998 with a newly identified ailment
‘social anxiety disorder (SAD). Suddenly the subject of every
North American talk show, the disorder was promoted through posters
in the UK with catchy phrases such as “Imagine Being Allergic
to People,” but without any mention of the remarkable new
drug Paxil that became available almost immediately. Then just
last year as sales of Paxil were declining the United States was
swept with a ‘hidden epidemic,’ generalized anxiety
disorder (GAD) that reportedly affected as many as 10 million
Americans.
So whether or not there’s a pharmaceutical company sponsoring
the Dunedin research remains to be seen. But even if there isn’t
the research still sends a chill up my scientific layperson’s
spine. Combine our growing reluctance to take personal responsibility
for our selves and our wider communities with the increasing ability
and desirability to medicate social problems and one thing’s
for sure; pretty soon when you walk out of the cinema you won’t
be leaving the sci-fi behind.
Have your say on this column:
Barb Sumner Burstyn.
© Barbara Sumner Burstyn
August 2002.
P.O.V. with
Barbara Sumner Burstyn @
http://www.spectator.co.nz/POV
and now @ http://www.mensnewsdaily.com
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