December 1999 Page 1

December 1999

After The FactA publication of the Institute for Science and Interdisciplinary Studies

Continued on page 10

By Mike FortunThe following is the edited text of a paper presented by ISISFounding Fellow Mike Fortun in the panel “Where IT’s At:Information Technologies and the Production of Identities,”at the Annual Meetings of the Society for the Social Studiesof Science, San Diego, CA, Oct. 27-30, 1999.

The fissure swarms – that’s a precise geologicalterm, not some metaphor I dreamed up – the fissureswarms that are mapped by these little black lines acrossIceland suggest a country constituted by eruptions, crustalupheavals, subglacial shifts, lacrustine sedimentations,and other kinds of multiple flows that swarm over andinto each other in inscrutable folds and crazy eddies. Ice-land is always already swarmed. So what’s the relation-ship between a swarm and information? Is a swarm somemurmuring precursor, submerged beneath the surface ofinformation like the ridges on the floor of the Atlantic

Global Swarmingin Iceland:

Genes, Fish, Journalists,Whales, Medical Records, & theContested Identity of a Nation

Continued on page 4

By Jim OldhamOn the 29th of October, the Secoya Indigenous Or-

ganization of Ecuador (OISE) celebrated an importantsuccess in the struggle to defend their rights and theirterritory as oil development encroaches on both. On thatday, in Quito, Ecuador, leaders of OISE and top officersof Occidental Exploration and Production Company(OEPC, subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum Corporation,AKA OXY) signed a code of conduct that establishes“principles, procedures, requirements, responsibilities,and obligations with which OISE and OEPC must com-ply” during their “dialogue related to oil activities ofOEPC in territory of the Secoya Nation…” It is a docu-ment dedicated to ensuring recognition of the Secoya’sconstitutional rights and establishing for them a moreequal relationship with the powerful multinational oilcompany.

Much of Secoya territory lies within Block 15, anoil exploration concession OEPC has contracted with the

Secoya, OccidentalSign Code of Conduct

Rainforest “Photoshoot” Page 3

Bolívar Beltrán & Humberto Piaguaje at the negotiations

After the FactPage 2

After the Fact is published semi-annually bythe Institute for Science and InterdisciplinaryStudies (ISIS) in Amherst, MA.We invite you to submit your comments andwriting to After the Fact. Contributions maybe made on paper or disk (preferably MSWord formatted) addressed to the editors at:

ISIS893 West Street box PHAmherst, MA 01002-5001

or via email at isis@hampshire.eduor by fax at (413) 559-5611We reserve the right to edit contributions forclarity and/or space considerations or todecline to print them altogether. Copy anddisks will not be returned to the contributorunless sent with a SASE.Managing Editor:.........................................Michael FortunProduction Editor:....................................Scott TundermannThis issue's contributors:...............................................Peter Haas.............................................Jim Oldham

Back issues & more at http://isis.hampshire.edu

By Peter HaasThe Military Waste Cleanup

Project has been in existence sinceISIS’s inception. Looking back at thepast seven years, our biggest activityhas been our mediating and techni-cal advisory role at the federally-man-dated Restoration Advisory Board(RAB) at nearby Westover Air Re-serve Base (WARB) in Chicopee,Mass. ISIS was chosen by WARB tohelp local citizens form the RAB, andthe Air Force turned the floor over toISIS at that initial meeting. Over 50citizens were present. They reachedthe most democratic result: everyonepresent became a member of the RABand David Keith, president of the ac-tivist Valley Citizens for a Safe En-vironment (VCSE), was elected com-munity co-chair by acclamation.We’ve been on the RAB ever since.

Over the years, we’ve workedclosely with VCSE and other citizenmembers, sharing experience and ad-vice to make the RAB more effective.For that purpose, the MassachusettsDepartment of Envi-ronmental Protectionhas awarded us andVCSE five TechnicalAssistance Grants(TAGs) in as manyyears to help inter-pret the vast amountof technical data andreports produced bythe engineers andconsultants at Westover. Thesegrants, although modest, have en-abled us to be much better advisorsto the RAB. Thanks to the TAGs wehave received, we developed a GIS(geographical information system)database on the environmental con-tamination at Westover; we’ve re-viewed and criticized numerous tech-nical reports which have influencedcleanup decisions; we have involvedlocal students and faculty from the

Five College Consortuim in thecleanup process through courseprojects and internships, and we’veworked to involve a broader citizenbase in the RAB so thatstakeholders can voicetheir concerns directly tothe officials responsible forcleanup at the base.

A problem we andVCSE have encountered atWestover is the lack of citi-zen involvement with theongoing cleanup processthere. In spite of the interest and thehuge turnout of base neighbors andstakeholders when the RAB was ini-tially convened a few years ago, in-terest in the RAB process has steadilydeclined over time. Many of the citi-zens initially interested in the RABhad sued the Air Force over noise andto prevent night flights. Once thatlawsuit was won (a unique case in theUS!) they stopped attending the RABmeetings, which were not so press-ing as the litigation. Others got frus-

trated at the fairly in-significant powers ofcitizens at the RAB,since by definition itonly is advisory, andconsequently the AirForce always has thedecision power in theend. Furthermore,many of the RABmembers are retired

military personnel who don’t wantnegative publicity for the base (or themilitary in general) and tend todownplay and sometimes ridiculecitizens’ concerns. Hence, the citizen/stakeholder/activist base at the West-over RAB has diminished to a fewVCSE members and ISIS.

After some consultation, VCSEhas advised us to contact Clean Wa-ter Action, an activist organizationworking nationwide to fight water

pollution and enforce drinking waterstandards, to collaborate with themin the next round of TAG funding.They have an ample local member-

ship and have offered us to includematerials on Westover in their peri-odic canvassing and outreach cam-paigns, helping us build a strongercitizen base at the RAB. It is our hopeto attract more stakeholders into theRAB to make sure that the cleanup atWestover is comprehensive and sat-isfies community needs and doesn'tjust minimally comply with regula-tory requirements. We look aheadwith optimism to working with CleanWater Action, and active citizen par-ticipation at Westover.

New Air for MilWaste Project

Local students learn hands-ontesting water at WARB

Contractors take soil samples at Westover(photo courtesy Montgomery Watson)

December 1999 Page 3

FAST FOOD:Fish Delivery in the Rainforest

The Secoya Survival Project has helped dozens ofSecoya and Siona families to build and stock theirown fish ponds and to learn how best to managethem. At left, a new batch of 10,000 juvenile fish(fingerlings) arrives by canoe. The fish, the fruit-eating cachama (Colossoma macropomum), aredelivered to fish farmers--200 fingerlings per

family--in plastic bags of water and oxygen (belowleft). They are then released into their new homes

in the ponds (below right) where, over the nextmonths, they will grow to harvest size. Project

evaluations will take place at Secoya dinner tables.

After the FactPage 4

Ocean that channel warm and coldcurrents into what we call Iceland’snational waters, in turn spawningenormous multiple swarms of cod,haddock, and far more obscure butnevertheless profitable fish that havebeen the mainstay of Iceland’seconomy, fish-swarm spawning capi-tal-swarm, and the swarm of capitalgets informed into social inequalities,as the technology-intensified fishingfleet depletes the stocks over decadesand the Icelandic parliament, theAlthingi, installs fishing quotas thatturned the murmuring schools of fishinto a form of property that, imaginethis, got distributed unequally andcontinues to cause social and politi-cal upheaval, but the only fish I sawwhen I was in Iceland in September1998 was on my dinner plate, since Iwas there to learn about Iceland’snewest and so far only genomics com-pany, deCODE Genetics, and its ef-fort to organize the whole swarmingpopulation of Iceland and its seeth-ing tissues and its ever-branchingmillenial genealogies into a databasefor drug discovery and health-caremanagement –— a story which will soon be famil-iar, if it isn’t already, since Icelandhas been swarming with ethnogra-phers and ethicists and other agentsof science studies: I went, the anthro-

pologist Paul Rabinow went, HilaryRose went, some drone from that hiveof bioethicists at the University ofPennsylvania went – ethnographerswarms, fish swarms, gene swarms,and this swarm of words that you’reprobably wondering if there’s anyINFORMATION in here or is this justgonna be some Kerouwhacked riff onIceland and genomics…

Allow me to informate mywords, then. deCODE Genetics is anIcelandic company, although it’s in-corporated in Delaware, and begin-ning with 14 million dollars in ven-ture capital and a 200 million dollarpromise sworn by that megaswarmHoffman LaRoche in February 1998,deCODE embarked on a project ofmultiple identity production that hascaused multiple social, scientific, andmedical controversies.

First, deCODE is producing it-self as an Icelandic-identified corpo-ration, staffed by Icelandic scientistsreturning to their homeland, to revi-talize the Icelandic national economythat’s been so dependent on fish andreorienting it around another kind ofbiomass, DNA. deCODE promises toaccomplish this by exploiting twopeculiarly Icelandic resources: anextensive and detailed set of genealo-gies assembled over this pastmillenium by ordinary Icelanders andmore recently by medical and scien-

tific institutions; and the quite homo-geneous Icelandic population itself,who are being sampled like this mu-sic, run through DNA sequencers andother robotic genomic assemblages,and organized into a database that willenable deCODE, in the words of theircorporate summary, “to design com-prehensive approaches to the man-agement of patients with a particulardisease or a constellation of diseases[and] to examine the impact of ge-netics in various aspects of diseasesor predisposition to the developmentof diseases… The database will pro-vide an excellent opportunity to de-sign approaches to preventive healthcare that will be based on detailedphenotypic, genotypic, and genea-logical information. Furthermore, itwill allow for the design of ap-proaches to cost cutting in the man-agement of health and disease.”

All this as a counter to the phe-nomenon called “helicopter re-search,” whereby the major pharma-ceutical companies and other geno-mics actors swarm over the biore-sources of less advantaged nations,usually below the equator rather thannear the Arctic Circle. Icelandic com-pany of Icelandic scientists using Ice-landic genes and genealogies to buildIceland’s economy and manage Ice-land’s health resources. And developdrugs for the Swiss swarm HoffmanLaRoche, drugs which Icelanders arepromised a free lifetime supply of,should they ever materialize.

“‘For a thousand years our na-tion has suffered because of its isola-tion,’ says Dr. Kari Stefansson, oneof Iceland’s leading medical special-ists. ‘Now, at last, modern sciencewill enable us to take advantage ofour isolation.’” That’s according tothe Iceland Investment News. Kari –everybody goes by first name in Ice-land – is the founder and CEO ofdeCODE, and is certainly making an

Icelandic Swarming & deCODEd GenesContinued from page 1

deCODE Genetics in Iceland

December 1999 Page 5identity for himself, having beencutely caricatured in The New Yorkerby David Levine, and photographedmore menacingly in Discover maga-zine and many other venues. Kari hasbrought new life to the word“Viking.”

And angered many Icelandicscientists, physicians, and other citi-zens in the process. A bill was intro-duced into the Althingi on March 31,1998, near the very end of the legis-lative session, called simply “A Billon Medical Databases.” To the com-plete surprise of Iceland’s scientificand medical community, the bill pro-posed that an unnamed licensee,which everyone knew to be deCODE,would be given the right to install acomputer terminal in everyphysician’s office in Iceland, collectdisease and prescription informationon each patient who visited, combinethis information with their medicalhistory as maintained by the nationalhealth care system, which deCODEwould also be given access to, andbuild a centralized database that tookthese medical histories; and com-bined them with deCODE’s comput-erized genealogies and their newlythroughputted genotypes; anddeCODE would have exclusive, mo-nopoly rights to this database fortwelve years.

To continue making a very longand tangled story very short andstraight: the initial bill was stoppedby a group of scientists, physicians,and psychiatrists who worked at theuniversity and the national hospital,and the legislation was to be redraftedand reconsidered by the Althingi inOctober 1998. I went to Iceland inearly September for two weeks, justas a summer of constant debate andargument was escalating into a dailyonslaught of newspaper, radio, andtelevision stories and commentaries.After more delays, political maneu-vering, and supposedly democraticdebate, Iceland’s Althingi passed the

database bill on December 17, 1998,37 in favor to 20 against, with 6 mem-bers absent.

At this point in our program awhale swims into view. Like manyIcelandic computer scientists and mo-lecular biologists, the Icelandic killerwhale movie star Keiko returned“home” while I was there. I was in-terested in Keiko not only because itwas the only other daily media storythat could preempt commentary ondeCODE, but because Keiko was thisconstant metaphorical referent, al-ways linked somehow to Kari anddeCODE.

Although Keiko doesn’t swiminto view here so much as he flies.Keiko flew in on a US Air Force C-17 (at the expense of the Free WillyFoundation whose donors includeTimeWarner and Mattel), a reminderof fifty years of U.S. military pres-ence and what some Icelanders stillcall the “selling out” of the nation toNATO. Keiko is now in his new foot-ball-field sized floating sea-pen thatwill allow “Keiko to be introducedgently to his native environment,” asmy in-flight magazine on IcelandAirinformed me. “Foam-filled pipeskeep the enclosure afloat, which in-cludes, among other things, a medi-cal pool, food preparation area, dive

locker and generator room, not for-getting sixteen underwater camerasthat will allow the rest of the worldto follow Keiko’s progress.”

Keiko’s progress?! Whales too,it seems, are pilgrims now, embarkedon a technoscientific becoming,sampled and monitored in the nameof some monstrous combination ofpreservation and evolution.

But are whales democratic?This was the odd question I kept ask-ing myself in Husavik, on the northcoast of Iceland, where I flew withKari and other members of thedeCODE team for a town meetingwhere they were going to present anddefend their controversial databaselegislation. There were about 45people here, from a town of 2,500,crowded into what used to be an ex-hibit room in what used to be somekind of whaling museum. Therewould have been more, I’m told, if itweren’t for the big annual sheepround-up, which includes much sing-ing and drinking. Definitely the pref-erable event, I thought. A local den-tist introduced Kari at great length,and out of the alien Icelandic lan-guage I recognized one word: Keiko.Everyone laughed. I sat through hoursof incomprehensible discourse.

With my ethnographic brainnecessarily off-line, my ethnographiceyes wandered to a fragment of textin the upper corner of the front wall,the trace of some former exhibit:“Uppruni hvala,” which I was toldtranslates into “whale evolution.” AsKari continued speaking, I halluci-nated the merger: Kari is Keiko.Surely their genomes are, what, like95 percent homologous? Abetted bythe fact that I couldn’t understand aword of what anybody was saying, Iregistered everything on a biologicallevel: a roomful of mammals, whale-kin, swimming and filtering the krillof language. Kari/Keiko cracked ajoke; I could tell because the other

Keiko, the "Free Willy" Whale

Continued on page 8

After the FactPage 6

By Scott TundermannDo you know the Keebler elf’s

first name? Can you picture the iconof the shoe company whose motto is“Just do it?” Can you tell the differ-ence between “driving excitement”and “a new kind of car company?”

If not, you’re a rare find in late-20th-Century America. The vast ma-jority of our people, rich or poor,young or old, of any color or gender,are experts on the subject of con-sumer product marketing. They maynot know their mayor or the factualaccuracy of their kids’ textbooks orwhere the nation’s military is at work,but they can recite jingles and theyrecognize the Nissan guy as readilyas their grandfathers. Advertising isa huge and far-reaching industry—indeed, it is the primary channel ofcommunication in our culture. Itstands to reason, therefore, to useadvertising to communicate any mes-sage to America. And that is just whatISIS’s Energy Choices Project is do-ing.

Perhaps you’ve come across themagazine AdBusters or other work bythe Media Foundation in Vancouver(www.adbusters.org). Their work ex-emplifies the radical use of conven-tional marketing techniques to pro-

mote alternative messages. The En-ergy project will do the same kindsof work, focused on green energy.The goal is to reposition green energy,currently an esoteric and uninspiringtopic, out of sight and mind in thesedays of cheap oil. Repositioninggreen energy means showing it as notonly a real alternative to conventionalenergy but also the smarter, safer,sexier, and more fun choice to make.

A number of experts, many ofthem engineers and economists, haveargued that the path to sustainabilityrequires that the technology be madecost-effective through R&D pro-grams and ramp-ups, at which pointthe market will embrace it and thegreen revolution will come. Thisanalysis is a classic theme of the con-ventional way of thinking, and in-deed, it would be possible to makerenewable energy viable that way. Butwhat would it take? A major commit-ment of finances, first to R&D pro-grams and then to pilot manufactur-ing facilities and so on. And fromwhere would that commitment come?There’s the rub. The nuclear indus-try got its ticket from the “defense”interests, but no one has yet comeforth with both the commitment andresources to do the same forrenewables. Without political (a.k.a.socio-cultural) will, such support cannever happen, whether or notrenewables benefit the public Good,the domestic economy, national se-curity, and both the natural and man-made environments.

Besides, that analysis makes afundamentally erroneous assumption:that green energy is just about newtechnologies. What about all the ex-isting technologies we don’t seeused? What about utility and govern-ment programs that subsidize saidexisting technologies, even install

them? Green energy is not about thesearch for cold fusion. Along withdifferent energy sources, it includessuch mundane elements as publictransit, lightswitches, bicycles andbike lanes, windows, and sweaters.Right now, today, there is huge cost-effective and technically feasible po-tential for a cleaner energy profile inthe United States. So we may con-clude that technology and econom-ics are not the primary impedimentsto energy sustainability.

It may be the case that simplehuman laziness is the primary impedi-ment, and that only ultra-convenienttechnologies will ever have a chanceof changing America’s energy profile.That’s a rather cynical perspective,though, and there is some evidenceto the contrary. Take recycling:curbside recycling programs havegained surprising popularity in a cul-ture noted for using five remote con-trols in one room. It’s not as conve-nient to recycle, but people still doit—why?

Presumably because it’s easyenough and it gives them a very tan-gible way to fulfill their sense of en-vironmental obligation. Studies re-port that some 70% of Americansconsider themselves environmental-ists, even if that doesn’t quite keepthem from driving an SUV and leav-ing their computer on around theclock. But they’re able to envisionteeming landfills and they’re able tomake a simple choice to help avoidthem. With some persuasiveness, wemay just get them to do the same withtheir energy use.

Back to the question of how topersuade them, which is where the ad-vertising approach comes in. The sci-ence of advertising has developedrather like the science of nuclear en-ergy: quite impressively thanks to thehuge financial stakes of those behind

The Revolution Will Have to Be Televised

December 1999 Page 7it. We can capitalize on their invest-ment and the resulting expertise toour own benefit, and there’s some-thing very appealing about using theopposition’s weapons against them.Moreover, the arena of advertising iswhere our daily “choices” are mostinfluenced—the audience sees salespitches for cars and trucks, comput-ers and home appliances, faster mealsor bigger meals or less fatteningmeals, all with the promise that youcan buy not only convenience buthappiness, self-worth, and satisfac-tion for the low, low price of $19.95.The ISIS energy project aims to getup on the same soapbox but to presenta very different message.

Now that we’ve established ourtarget and our weapon, we’ll have todecide on ammo. Thankfully, the ad-vertising industry (and the corre-sponding academic fields) have donevolumes of fire testing, so we knowabout affective associations (connect-ing your product with feelings of hap-piness, companionship, status, com-fort, etc.), mnemonic techniques

(jingles, repetition, catch-phrases, and other memorablegimmicks), sound and color en-vironments, use of humor andclever tricks and gags, cost pre-sentation, fear-selling vs. life-selling, and so on. All that re-mains is to judge the right shotfor the target, load, aim, and fire.

The energy project is for-tunate this fall to have the effortsof Hampshire College designstudents Andrew Beck and ColinSagan. Under coordinator ScottTundermann’s supervision, theyhave been busy brainstormingand drafting both print and videomedia presentations. Their ideasborrow from and parody thework of consumables marketingas well as taking off on their owndirection with the unique appeals ofgreen energy. They’ve drafted a num-ber of spots, sampled on these pages,and they’ll continue to create biggerand better ads in the coming months.

But producing these swank adsis just fun with Photoshop unless theyhave some way to reach their audi-

ence, so we’re also develop-ing opportunities for publicdissemination. Postering thelocal campuses and commu-nities and publishing on theweb are easy and relativelycheap but fairly limited inscope. Local print media, in-cluding the newspapers andthe arts weeklies, are muchbetter fora but also exponen-tially more expensive. Andour long-term plans for tele-vision access are really go-ing to need financial backing.As the new year dawns andour computers shudder at thebrink of catastrophe, phasetwo of the plan will com-mence. With examples of ourwork in hand, we’ll approach

prospective funders with more cred-ibility than we’d have with just a ba-sic proposal for a future project.Rather than offering what work wewould be doing, we’ll show themwhat we have and point out that withfunding we’d be able to do even bet-ter work and distribute it much morewidely and effectively. This approachof fundraising for the expansion ofexisting work has served ISIS’s otherprojects in the past so we hope to havethe same success in this case. Whatremains is to identify the idealfunders, with one foot in green en-ergy and the other in media/market-ing activities.

Green energy un-commercialsare, if nothing else, an unusual ap-proach to the problem. And sincetechnology and classical economicsare insufficient for the challenge, wehave nothing to lose and everythingto gain by pursuing the culture ofenergy choices. With some smart,funny, memorable messages, wemight just create the public awarenessand interest never generated by “con-ventional” green energy efforts.

A sketch of a concept to put energy"products," like windmills and oil

derricks, on a store display rack likeother consumer choices

Inspired by cologne ads, a sleek andelegant 3D wind turbine with a sort of

bandwagon green energy messageCheck http://isis.hampshire.edu/energy/ for updates!

After the FactPage 8

whales responded appropriately, leap-ing at the words like a tasty fish. Themammals took a symbolic vote:unanimously in favor of deCODE. Itwas democracy as Sea World: ascripted performance of trained ani-mals, somersaulting and squeaking to

the gestures of the ones who have ar-rogated for themselves the title MoreEvolved.

If my bad attitude about democ-racy generally extends easily to de-mocracy in Iceland it’s partly becauseliberal commentators are now fallingall over themselves to extol the demo-cratic process to which genomics andits databases were supposedly sub-jected in Iceland. Paul Billings, a veryresponsible geneticist by all our usualmetrics of responsibility, reassuredreaders of American Scientist that“after a broad-based public debate,employing democratic institutionsincluding a free press and indepen-dent legislature, the country imposedlimits on this new biomedicaleffort…[T]he construction of scienceand its associated enterprises by thepeople of Iceland is paradigmatic; itrepresents an example of the asser-tion of national principles and sover-eignty over international science andbiotechnology. The outcome of genehunting in Iceland may be better inthe end than in North America or

Europe.” 1

To which the best responsemight be the double positive: yeah,right. This Icelandic coporation is al-ready incorporated, literally, into theNorth American corporate and legalgenome, and Roche’s promised $200million is like a futural viral vector

of Europe quietly repro-ducing itself in the Icelan-dic economy. (A prom-ised $200 million whichcomes in part, no doubt,from the price fixing ofvitamins for which Rocheand other Europeanwhale corporations justgot busted.)

What exactly doesnational sovereigntymean in the biotech and

genomic world, a world in which thePrime Minister of Iceland, in a pub-lic ceremony, passed a pen betweenthe representatives of deCODE andRoche? The former President of Ice-land was on deCODE’s board of di-rectors until shortly before the healthdatabase bill was passed. deCODEpractically wrote the government’slegislation for the health sector data-base and – let’s remember our historyin this ethnography – tried its best tocram that legislation through late inthe spring 1998 parliamentary ses-sion, tried its best to avoid not onlypublic debate, but any discussion atall within the scientific and medicalprofessional communities. And if theunwanted debate sometimes took onridiculous proportions, KariStefansson bears much of the respon-sibility, with the astoundingly largeego and susceptibility to arrogancethat genomics corporations seem toscreen for in their CEOs. He consis-tently trivialized serious issues andgave his critics little more than a dis-missive sneer.

And as long as we’re speakingabout democracy let’s also not forgetto mention, at least in passing, thatthe honored liberal ethical biomedi-cal principle of informed consent wasstood on its head with its ass in thechill Icelandic air, since all citizenswere presumed to consent to be in thedatabase until they exercised theirnew right to opt out – which 13,000have done to date. Not that I place alot of faith in the redeeming powersof informed consent, but I sure don’tlike to see corporation-nation assem-blages toss it aside with the lame ex-cuse that it would be too complicated,time-consuming, and cumbersome.We’re talking about a democracy of275,000 people here.

I’m also no big fan of bioethicscommittees, but ”unjust” and “un-democratic” are the only words ap-propriate for the Icelandicgovernment’s dismissal this summerof the bioethics committee that wouldhave been involved with the healthsector database. The ethics commit-tee whose seven members were se-lected by the government from nomi-nations by Iceland’s major health andscientific institutions, was summarilydissolved by the government undersome pressure from deCODE, and re-formed as a five-member body se-lected solely by government officials– officials of an Icelandic govern-ment, it should be added, which for-mally owns and will use the databaseit is supposedly regulating, AND anIcelandic government which, throughits state banks, is itself a major in-vestor in deCODE Genetics.

“Broad-based public debate”? Idon’t quite know what I would callwhat went down in Iceland in 1998,but that is the palest expression pos-sible, and I not only observed it, I gotsucked into producing it. For a brieftime I linked up with a variety of Ice-

Icelandic Swarming & deCODEd Genes

Uppruni Hvala with Dr. Kari Stefansson

Continued from page 5

December 1999 Page 9landic information technologies,abetted by my key informant Skuli,who also scheduled me for three pub-lic talks and a seemingly endless se-ries of media encounters. I had mi-crophones jammed repeatedly in myface, film and video cameras pointedat my head, my voice went out mul-tiple times over the public radio fre-quencies. Believe me, it was an “ex-perimental moment in the human sci-ences,” to use Marcus and Fischer’sphrase. No scholar, no activist, noscientist, no corporate executive, nocitizen has yet developed a languageor a politics that will meet up withthe swarms of genomics in a produc-tive, just way. “Democratic de-bate” is perhaps the most ill-fit-ted and misleading phrase of all.

While the Icelanders wereunderstandaby hoping for somekind of resolution to this coales-cence of swarm-effects, somenumbered and lettered demo-cratic script to follow, my firstjob as ethnographer, I theorized,was to intensify the swarm ef-fects. Thus I found myself in, toput it mildly, a double-bind: re-sponsible to an evocation and inten-sification of the quasi-infinite, mon-strous complexities of the sciences,political economies, cultures, and lan-guages of genomics, AND respon-sible for the responsible productionof responsible sound bites in themidst of a monstrously serious andmonstrously urgent event in a nationwhose language was utterly foreignto me. One of the things I was askedto speak about was ethics andgenomics, and while it would havebeen unethical for me not to roundup the usual ethical suspects — ge-netic screening, privacy and data-bases, conflicts of interest, idiotic re-ductionist arguments – I also believedit would be unethical not to do some-thing beyond that as well, or at leastother than that.

So I read the crowd some litera-

ture. Specifically, a long passage fromThe Atom Station, that black-humorednovel about democracy as joke, writ-ten by Iceland’s Nobel laureateHalldor Laxness, with the sale of Ice-land to NATO and U.S. military pres-ence during the Cold War as back-ground. More specifically, a sectioncalled “Buying an anemone” in achapter titled “Orgy.” It seemed ap-propriate. It’s an incredibly rich pas-sage and it took me like ten minutesto read the whole thing, and I thinkeven the Icelanders were puzzled asto why I read it and I had much moretime then to try to explain than I donow, but trust me: it was utterly ap-

propriate. One never knows how lit-erature works, what exactly it per-forms, but I trust that it’s part of anethics not of the restricted economyof the moral code, but a much crazierand more difficult ethics of the gift,of openness to unknown others andan unknown future.

So where’s IT at in Iceland?Right where it always is, and rightwhere the ethnographer is: in themidst of multiple swarms, biological,genealogical, financial, institutional,personal, and cultural. The healthsector database sits uneasily at the in-tersections of these swarms, a com-plex sociotechnical machineinformating these unruly flows intousable forms. If on some occasions Ideem my ethnographic job to be aswarm-intensifier, trusting in theperformative qualities of literature,

it’s also the case that a democracy yetto come, in Iceland or elsewhere, willhave demanded some decisions andjudgments. It will have been neces-sary to make statements containingthe phrase “it is necessary.”

So here we go: commercialgenomics is a sociopolitical-scientificexperiment that it is necessary thatIceland undertake. The current social,political, economic, cultural, and sci-entific protocols for that experimentsuck, and are utterly inappropriate forthe swarming complexities withwhich it engages. It is necessary toinvent democratic institutions, proce-dures, and forms of debate that are

more than some folk-song ve-neer. It is necessary that the lead-ers of genomics enterprises notbe volcanic, volatile, ambitious,impatient, arrogant, or snide. Itis necessary that there be somekind of independent, third-party,oversight mechanism of criti-cism, regulation, and continualreevaluation.It is necessary that there be mul-tiple genomics enterprises inIceland, public and private. Per-

sonally, I’d like to see 275,000genomics companies in Iceland, kindof like the stock market’s day-trad-ers: on-line, real-time gene tradersarmed with strong cryptographictools, looking for the best percentagethey can get for the information thatthey are, but oddly, don’t as yet own.Or maybe that isn’t such a great idea;it’s hard to tell in these situations. Inany case, monopolies like the onedeCODE is seeking to establish areunacceptable in a situation which re-quires a swarm of researchers in aswarm of profit-making and non-profit making institutions, to meet upproductively and justly with theswarms of molecules, organs, andother languages that constitute bod-ies in health and illness.

1 Paul Billings, “Iceland, Blood & Science,”American Scientist 87 (May-June 99), p 199

After the FactPage 10

Ecuadorian government to develop.Since 1995, OEPC has been intermit-tently active in Secoya territory, do-ing seismic and topographic studiesin various parts of the territory. Togain Secoya permission to carry outthese activities they have had a se-ries of negotiated agreements withOISE, but these negotiations andagreements have been marked bymisunderstandings, contradictions,and lack of Secoya access to infor-mation or to independent advisors.

This history culminated a year ago inOISE’s discovery and denunciation ofa secret agreement between OEPCand residents of one Secoya villageallowing exploratory drilling in Sec-oya territory. The rejection of thisagreement by the majority of the Sec-oya, and the renunciation of theagreement by the minority who hadsigned, under pressure and withoutaccess to advisors or information, ledto annulment of the agreement. Sincethen, OISE has worked, with supportfrom the Institute for Science and In-terdisciplinary Studies, the Center forEconomic and Social Rights, andother allies, to establish a set of rulesto govern their dialogue with OEPC.

OEPC’s initial reaction was toargue that a code of conduct was un-

necessary butOISE’s position thatwithout a code theircould be no dia-logue—no discus-sion of any proposedoil activities in Sec-oya territory—forced them tomodify this stance.After four months ofdifficult negotia-tions over the word-ing of the code, itwas finally signed—in Spanish and Pai Coca, the languageof the Secoya nation—at a ceremonyin Quito attended by 90 Secoya, sev-eral Ecuadorian Government Minis-

ters and sub-secretar-ies, international ob-servers, and most ofOEPC’s Quito basedemployees.The Secoya fought

for, and signed, theCode of Conductwith OEPC in orderto ensure:1) an honest andtransparent dialogue.2) recognition and ap-

plication of the Secoya Nation’s rightto information, participation, consul-tation, and self-determination regard-ing activities in their territory.3) recognition of the Secoya Indig-enous Organization of Ecuador—thedemocratically electedgoverning organiza-tion of the Secoya Na-tion—as the only Sec-oya representative inthe dialogue withOEPC.4) access to informa-tion about the possibleenvironmental, social,and cultural impacts ofoil activities proposedfor Secoya territory.5) their right to choose,

freely and without restrictions, theconsultants and advisors that theyneed to understand and respond to theproposals of OEPC.6) their right to make decisions ac-cording to Secoya norms and tradi-tions, without pressures of time or anyother sort.7) the principle that OEPC is respon-sible to provide all necessary financ-ing for full, informed OISE partici-pation in the dialogue, yet there canbe no implied or intended influenceon or commitment by OISE as a re-sult of this financing.

The winning of the code hasbeen a long and difficult process andit represents only the beginning of anew phase in the dialogue betweenOISE and OEPC. The oil companyremains adamant that they are obligedby their contract with the Ecuador-ian government to drill three explor-

Code ofConduct

Continued from page 1

Secoya and advisors at the site of a proposed oil well

The Occidental side of the negotiating table

Roque Piaguaje shares his vision for thefuture at an ISIS workshop on oil impacts

December 1999 Page 11

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atory wells in Secoya territory bythe end of the year 2000. Theyhope to negotiate an agreementpermitting this work with OISEby March 31, 2000, at the latest.Given this pressure, it will be atleast as difficult for OISE to de-fend the rights defined in thecode as it was to win their rec-ognition. We hope that publicknowledge, in the US and Ecua-dor, of the Code, along with in-terest in the continuing dialogue

process, will help ensure the pro-tection of Secoya rights as theyconsider decisions that couldpermanently change their lives,their land, and their culture.

Full copies of the Codein English translation as well asSpanish and Pai Coca are avail-able from ISIS. Please email JimOldham at joldham@hamp-shire.edu or write us at ISIS—Prescott House, 893 West Street,Amherst, MA 01002.

Barbara Baffa*Lisa Bertoldi

Linda Bresky*Annie Chappell*

Dean CyconEdward Dees

John DellMichael Fischer

Sidney FulopDanny Greenspun

David GruberJock Herron

David Hopkins*A.R. LaPalme

Lucy McFaddenMichael Sands & Betsy Dietel

Ruth SkoglundJoseph TurnerAnne Ullman*

Sharon Wachsler*Peggy Wolff*

Goodbye & HelloAfter a busy year at ISIS, Sonia Lindop, our Secoya SurvivalProject Coordinator has resigned to return to work in video docu-mentaries. We wish her well and thank her for her hard workand dedication to the Secoya struggle. We are fortunate to havealready found a new Project Coordinator, Ecuadorian BiologistFelipe Campos, who will work as a consultant to the Project.Felipe brings many years of experience working in the Orienteand is knowledgeable about both the environment and the cul-tures of the rainforest. As a full time in-country consultant hewill increase our ability to work closely with OISE in the com-ing months. We are glad to have him.

After the FactPage 12

Inside this Issue:

Another genomics adventure withour own Mike Fortun.......Page 1

Secoya Organization secures Codeof Conduct with Oxy Oil....Page 1

Military Waste Cleanup projectlooks back, and forward.....Page 2

Fast food in the rainforest: anaquaculture picture page.....Page 3

Energy project meets MadisonAvenue.............................Page 8

Donors, tidbits, and a gently insis-tent form for our readers...Page 11

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