Biopolicy after three decades

T hirty years ago there were at most only a handful of political scientists who were interested in or publishing about policy issues in the life sciences, concentrated primarily in the health or environmental policy areas. As a result, political science was notably absent as a discipline either in the literature, at conferences, or as members of state or national commissions, advisory bodies, or institutional review boards involving the life sciences. Although most of the early activity in biopolitics understandably was focused on the evolutionary and behavioral aspects, from the beginning Thomas Wiegele and others believed it was vital to ensure that biopolitics coverage was inclusive and that the policy dimension be a critical component. For that reason, when building the graduate program in biopolitics at Northern Illinois University, Wiegele’s first faculty hire was a policy person. This is also why one of the two articles in the premier issue of the journal was ‘‘Biopolicy: A Restatement of Its Role in Politics and the Life Sciences.’’ In that article, I argued that scholars in all areas of politics and the life sciences had significant contributions to make to biopolicy because they possessed an awareness and appreciation of biological fact and a grasp of the relevant biological issues. Until that time, the enunciation and shaping of issues in the life sciences had come from biological scientists themselves and from the then-emerging bioethics movement. I outlined a range of biopolicy issues at the individual, societal and global levels (see Table 1) and stated that these areas represented but the surface of an extensive array of biopolicy concerns that should be of interest to scholars in biopolitics. In each case, the political ramifications were widespread and complicated and I asserted that a biopolitical perspective would be helpful. I contended then that if we as political scientists were to transcend disciplinary boundaries, it was imperative that our discipline be able to offer life scientists, policy makers, and the interested broader public tangible guidance regarding the policy ramifications of the rapid advances across the life sciences. I also argued that political scientists had a useful perspective as well as substantive knowledge about the political process to offer those in the life sciences. More importantly, fundamental policy questions needed to be addressed on the basis of the unfolding knowledge of the evolutionary foundations of political systems and political behavior, such as whether the current political institutions were capable of dealing with new issues produced by biology. To that end, I argued that we must make clear the policy implications of knowledge gained through biobehavioral research, including a need for expanded time frames for public policy and for more comprehensive, anticipatory assessment of a policy on future generations. Thus, we needed to influence the very framework of policy decision making by infusing biobehavioral knowledge into research on the policy process itself. For good examples of potentially valuable contributions to this new policy framework, see Corning on synergism, Somit and Peterson on democracy, Caldwell on biocracy, and Masters, Flohr, and Losco on bureaucracy, just to cite a few. In summary, I argued for the need for a systematic effort to coordinate and integrate the then-divergent areas of biopolicy research if we were to have any input doi: 10.2990/30_1_52