| Duster
is currently Chancellor's Professor of Sociology and Director of the
Institute for the Study of Social Change at the University of
California, Berkeley, and currently the Professor of sociology at New York University.
He is the recipient of a number of research fellowships, including a
Guggenheim Fellowship and a Senior Research Fellow Award from the Ford
Foundation. He is a member of the National Advisory Council for Human
Genome Research, the Board of Directors of the Association of American
Colleges and Universities, and has served as chair of the Advisory
Committee on Ethical, Legal and Social Issues of the Human Genome
Project.
"In
his capacity as vice chair of the National Center for Human Genome
Research on Ethical, Legal and Social Issues, he tackles some of the
weightiest ethical and social issues surrounding the human genome and
identification of genes that may contribute to disease," Black
Issues in Higher Education (December 23, 1999) said of Duster:
"Throughout
US history, the debate about how African Americans can and should best
relate to this country has waged back and forth, between
assimilation/integration to separation/autonomy," Duster says. From
1955 to 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X personified this
debate. "But this was also the decade of 'The Organization Man'-a
singular version of a competent and successful person, lock-step white,
male, and with increasing homogenization, middle class," he said.
Racial
integration or separation had a very different meaning in the period
than it does today. In his presentation, Duster explores an alternative
to this either/or version of assimilation vs. separation and suggests
that we are now witnessing a convergence of the legacies of both King
and Malcolm.
Duster has
been a member of the Assembly of Behavioral and Social Sciences of the
National Academy of Sciences; the Committee on Social and Ethical
Impacts of Advances in Biomedicine, Institute of Medicine; the Special
Commission of the Association of American Law Schools; and the
Commission on Meeting the Challenges of Diversity in an Academic
Democracy. He was also a member of the Science Advisory Panel, National
Institutes of Health, Research on Violence.
His books
and monographs include The Legislation of Morality, Aims and Control of
the Universities, Cultural Perspectives on Biological Knowledge
(co-edited with Karen Garrett), and Backdoor to Eugenics, a book on the
social implications of the new technologies in molecular biology. He is
also the author of a number of articles, most recently "The Social
Consequences of Genetic Disclosure Culture and Biology," which was
published in a major report to the Office of Energy Research, Office of
Health and Environmental Research of the US Department of Energy
entitled "Pathways and Barriers to Genetic Testing and Screening:
Molecular Genetics Meets the 'High-Risk' Family."
*Content
from Michigan Tech Website:
http://www.admin.mtu.edu/urel/breaking/2000/MLK.html |
