Am I Victorian to argue that the characteristics of Caster Semenya’s sex-determining genetics are surely not a subject for public discussion? It is private information and it should stay that way. The public has no right to such highly personal information. Genetic privacy should be protected in law.

Genes are assemblies of chemical letters called deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA that send signals to proteins to make the biological apparatuses of all living things. It has been only five years that the science community has been able to look at all of the millions of chemical letters that constitute the human genome.

Medical geneticists are able to read our genomes for disease propensity and increasingly have access to biomedical technologies that may have therapeutic applications to suit the individual’s condition. Genome genetics or genomics is therefore a frontier science and the issue of genetic privacy a relatively recent concept in the field of bio-ethics.

"I keep telling you guys my aim is to become a legend," said Usain Bolt, after smashing the world 200 metres record and becoming the first man to hold the 100 and 200 metres sprints in both the Olympics and the Athletics World Championships.

Competition at international sporting events is fierce and the pursuit of an edge, sometimes measured in hundredths of a second, leads some to cheat.  Steroid abuse aims to increase the strength, speed and endurance of what is natural.  But the androgens created by the body are not set to any standard.  Some people do genuinely produce more than others.  Figuring out what is normal and what is not is difficult.

And, sometimes, something else is going on.

With the controversy surrounding Caster Semenya, Dr Wilmot James looks at Charles Darwin's early views on race and reflects on the modern molecular view more broadly of human variation at the next FREE Darwin lecture on September 2. He will illustrate the qualitative and quantitative characteristics of the biology of human difference.

When Charles Darwin visited the Cape in 1836 as part of his circumnavigation of the world on the HMS Beagle, he and Captain Robert Fitzroy observed that the missionaries had done well to turn human beings living in a state of savagery to become social beings capable of civilization, which is why Fitzroy and Darwin felt the Cape Europeans’ antipathy to missionaries was sorrowful. The origin of the feeling was, of course, the missionaries’ support for the abolition of slavery – a cause with which Darwin, more than Fitzroy, happened to agree. The idea that the moral nature of people was not unalterably fixed was a forward-looking one at the time. Neither was the proposition racially defined, for Fitzroy and Darwin applied the notion of the ‘alterable savage’ to their own Saxon ancestors whom they referred to as ‘barbarians’.

Date :   Wednesday 2 September 2009
Time :    5:30pm for 6:00pm
Venue: New Learning Centre, Health Sciences Campus, UCT, Anzio  Road, Observatory

RSVP:   Linet at 021 557 0246
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