Geneticizing Ethnicity: A study on the “Taiwan Bio-Bank”

Abstract

Taiwan as an island country is an immigrant society where interethnic marriages have been common. In the past centuries, it has not been unusual that people in Taiwan change their ethnic identities for various reasons. Its "four great ethnic groups" (sida zuqun)-the Hoklo, Hakka, Mainlanders, and aboriginal peoples-exist only as a social construction that arose in the 1990s in a specific political-cultural context. In 2005, a major government-sponsored research project, the Taiwan Biological Sample Bank-or Taiwan Bio-Bank (TBB)-was organized by a group of scientists and physicians. The purpose of the project is to collect genetic data from the "four great ethnic groups" of Taiwan in order to build a national database. This paper has three parts. First, I briefly review how the relationship between genetic attribution and the conceptualization of race/ethnicity has been addressed by social scientists and medical researchers since the mid twentieth century. Secondly, I analyze the history of biomedicine in Taiwan and the social and political context of the formation of the TBB project and its precursors. Thirdly, I examine the TBB's theoretical and methodological assumptions about race/ethnicity in Taiwan. I point out that the rise of biomedicine since the 1990s has contributed to the "ethnicization of biomedicine," in the sense that scientists have used dubious ethnic/racial categories with increasing frequency in practicing biomedicine.

ELSI practices in genomic research in East Asia: implications for research collaboration and public participation

“…The Taiwan Biobank was launched in 2005 as part of Taiwan’s strategy to promote biomedicine and technology [29]. However, this project has been repeatedly criticized by specific human rights groups and legal scholars who have expressed concerns about genetic privacy, informed consent, linkage of databases, conflict of interest, procedural justice, and legitimacy of technology policymaking [53]. This has resulted in rigorous legislative and regulatory requirements as reflected in the HBMA and HRSA, which have limited the development of similar tissue storage or biobanking approaches and the access and utilization to such samples for the last few years.…”

Shortcut to success? Negotiating genetic uniqueness in global biomedicine

“…Our broader data set consists of official documents, newspaper articles, and scientific articles from a number of international cases -Mexico (Benjamin, 2009), Brazil (Gibbon, 2016;, Quebec (Hinterberger, 2012), Iceland (Pálsson, 2007), Singapore (Ong, 2016), Taiwan (Tsai, 2010), and Finland -where these debates have taken place and which have received social scientific or anthropological research attention. We have sought to use these cases to identify the key dynamics in the debate between the benefits of one type of population over another (homoand heterogeneity), as well as the ways in which these categories are constructed.…”

“…Third, the discussions surrounding genetic uniqueness and homogeneity are closely related to questions of inclusion and identity, by which we mean that population characterizations rely heavily on developing selection criteria (Lipphardt, 2010;Prainsack, 2007: 85). For instance, in Taiwan the claim of the unique population requires balancing between the four main ethnic groups -groups that Tsai (2010) shows to be more hybrid and open to contestation than the practices of a population biobank in Taiwan would suggest. In Singapore, the uniqueness and claimed potential usefulness of the collection in Biopolis comes from the claim that it represents all of 'Asia' (Ong, 2016).…”

A different kind of association between socio‐histories and health

“…The debates continue to escalate as genomics researchers collect and analyse massive databases of human DNA sequence information. Social scientists have also examined efforts of nations to ‘own’ ‘their’ genomes and claim genomic sovereignty (Benjamin ), as well as how individuals shape notions of self‐identity and homeland through genetic ancestry tracing (Nelson ), governance and genomics (Abu El‐Haj ; Lee C. ; Nash ), indigeneity, ethnicity and genetics (Reardon ; Tallbear ; Tsai ). Many others have studied the use (or not) of race in biomedical genomics (Lee C. ; Braun and Hammonds ; Lee, Koenig and Richardson ) and in pharmacogenomics and clinical medicine (Montoya ; Epstein ; Kahn ; Lee S. ; Sankar ; Sankar, Cho and Mountain ; Paradies et al.…”

“…Still others have examined the movement of genomics into forensic police practices (Cho and Sankar ; M'Charek ; Ossorio ; Ossorio and Duster ). If we move away from the USA, research on these issues is being conducted in Singapore (Sun ); Taiwan (Tsai ); in Brazil (Santos et al. ); in Canada (Hinterberger ); the UK (e.g., Hedgecoe and Martin ; Tutton et al.…”