ESRC-COMPLEXITY SEMINAR SERIES
SEMINAR 1: COMPLEXITY & POLICY: THE GLOBAL GOVERNANCE OF NEW HEALTH TECHNOLOGIES
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SESSION 1: PERSONAL GENOMICS & COMPLEXITY: THE PRACTICE OF COMPLEXITY
BARBARA PRAINSACK & HENDRIK WAGENAAR
(INTRODUCED BY EVE MITLETON-KELLY & BRIAN SALTER)
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ABSTRACT:
There is growing recognition that complexity is an ontological feature of the world, and as such a crucial issue for understanding the limits and possibilities of concerted human action. However, for complexity theory to be useful for policy analysis, we have to overcome two main obstacles: First, instead of operating with a rather undifferentiated concept of "systems" (assuming that all systems shared the same characteristics which could exhaustively explain their relevant properties), we need to understand the characteristics of complex human-material systems and how these affect the dynamics of complexity. Second, policy analysts tend to see complexity primarily as an obstacle in the path of concerted human action. While it is certainly true that complexity makes things more 'difficult', we should also think of complexity in terms of intervention. Complexity is an inescapable feature of the world that humans have dealt with for centuries, if not millennia. Actors harness complexity by acting on the situation at hand; by intervening in it and observing if what happens accords with the expectations they have held. We will use the case of the rise of Personal Genomics to illustrate and develop our argument.