[Hamp-law] May 1st Lecture, "Anthropology and Volatility: deCODE Genetics and Other Icelandic Scandals, " 1:30pm at Hampshire College

[Jennifer Hamilton]

Mike Fortun, Keynote Speaker at the Five College Undergraduate 
Anthropology Conference
1:30pm, Hampshire College, East Lecture Hall in Franklin Patterson Hall 
(FPH)
Lecture free and open to the public

"Anthropology and Volatility: deCODE Genetics and Other Icelandic Scandals"

This presentation uses Iceland’s deCODE Genetics as an index of 
developments in the science and political economy of genomics, and the 
international political economy more broadly, from the late 1990s to the 
present. It begins with deCODE’s incorporation in 1996, overwhelmingly 
dependent on a financial promise from primary shareholder Hoffmann-La 
Roche for operating capital, and dependent as well on a political 
alliance that granted deCODE access to the medical records of the 
Icelandic nation. It follows the resistance of Icelandic physicians and 
citizens to this “Health Sector Database” deCODE during what are now 
called the “grey market” years, when deCODE, a Luxembourg shell 
corporation, and Icelandic banks together used inflated stock prices to 
raise $69 million, mostly from hundreds of Icelanders fed promises of 
national greatness and profit. And it continues through deCODE’s 
lucrative 2001 initial public offering (IPO) on NASDAQ, fueled by the 
speculations of on-line investors in a volatile economy, through years 
of steadily increasing scientific success and steadily decreasing fiscal 
solvency, until its bankruptcy in 2009. Along the way I discuss how 
changes in U.S. securities law fueled the volatility that inflated 
deCODE’s scientific and economic promises to its shareholders, how the 
political alliance behind deCODE became implicated in the collapse of 
the entire Icelandic economy, and how Keiko the killer whale can help us 
make sense of it all.

*About Mike Fortun*

A graduate of Hampshire College ('82), Mike Fortun is an associate 
professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at 
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York, USA. He was co-editor 
(with Kim Fortun) of Cultural Anthropology, the journal of the Society 
for Cultural Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association. A 
historian of the life sciences, his current research focuses on the 
contemporary science, culture, and political economy of genomics. His 
work in the life sciences has covered the policy, scientific, and social 
history of the Human Genome Project in the U.S., the history of 
biotechnology, and the growth of commercial genomics and bioinformatics 
in the speculative economies of the 1990s. Fortun is the author of 
Promising Genomics: Iceland and DeCODE Genetics In a World of 
Speculation published by University of California Press.

-- 
Dr. Jennifer A. Hamilton
Assistant Professor of Legal Studies and Anthropology
School of Social Science
Hampshire College
FPH G-6, 893 West Street
Amherst, MA 01002
(413) 559-5677 (o)
(413) 559-5620 (f)
jhamilton at hampshire.edu
https://hampedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Hamilton