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Home > News & Events > CLA Today Archive > Winter 2003 : Taussig Dances Into Scholarly Life

Taussig Dances Into Scholarly Life

by Joanna Dornfeld

As a child, Karen-Sue Taussig loved to dance. She dreamed of a life on stage. She even graduated early from her Berkeley, Calif., high school to pursue a ballet dancing career in New York City.

While wandering through a New York City bookstore when she was 18, Taussig spotted History of Manners, by Norbert Elias. She was so intrigued that she put the book on her Christmas wish list.

What Taussig didn't know at the time was that Elias was a renowned sociologist whose ideas would one day help shape her career as a social scientist. For the time being, she had her sights set on dancing.

When she was 20, Taussig had to decide: Move to Europe to continue dancing, or pursue another career. "I was fed up being treated like a stupid ballerina,” she says. And so she returned to Berkeley and enrolled at the University of California, where she majored in interdisciplinary social sciences and became increasingly driven by the ideas and intellectual issues raised in her classes.

After considering teaching high school, Taussig realized she wanted to generate knowledge, not just pass it on—so graduate school was her natural next step. Over the course of her education, both graduate and undergraduate, she kept running into an old, though passing, acquaintance, Norbert Elias—not the man himself, but his books, which were assigned again and again.

At Johns Hopkins University, Taussig's initial research interest in the body and power expanded to focus on the body in medicine and health sciences. While assisting an anthropologist who was working on a book about immunology and AIDS in the early 1990s, she became interested in scientific research—laying the groundwork for her expertise in medical anthropology, an emerging interdisciplinary field in which health practices and ideas and beliefs about health and illness are studied across cultures.

At the time, the Human Genome Project was just getting off the ground, and Taussig was hooked. In the spirit of Elias, whose work had always focused on norms of acceptable behavior, she focused on the effects of genetic information on people's lives, and began to look at how people justify the choices they make regarding health and illness.

We are in a "transformative moment in history,” Taussig says. "The science and technology being developed are going to have a huge impact on future generations.

“We will need to understand the many new developments in a fine-grained way. The new genetic information is a piece of what we have to understand in all of its complexity.”

Twenty years ago, Taussig notes as an example, obesity was tied almost exclusively to eating habits and activity level; today, obesity is more often explained (at least in the scientific community) in terms of genetic predisposition. This information changes how obesity is viewed and treated by the medical profession, and affects the choices people make and the way they view their bodies in relation to cultural norms.

These days, Taussig is hard at work on a book examining the ethical issues raised by the availability of genetic information—and the choices confronting both health care professionals and lay people. Specifically, she is studying the "social context in which people are making decisions about what makes a child acceptable.”

Heritable dwarfism is a case in point. For dwarf couples with the heritable condition, there is a 25 percent chance that neither parent will pass on the dwarfing gene; a 50 percent chance that one will pass it on (producing a child of short stature); and a 25 percent chance that both will pass it on, an inheritance fatal to the child.

Genetic testing would allow the couples to know whether their child will be born with the fatal condition and to make a difficult choice: either terminate the pregnancy or prepare to give birth to a doomed child.

Noting that advances in genetic research require large-scale collection and analysis of people's DNA and their medical and family histories, Taussig is looking at several models of data gathering to determine how best to enlist the cooperation of the general public.

Average citizens do not necessarily understand the value of such research to the medical profession, she says. And yet, she adds, "What models we choose to adopt have really important implications for the foundation that the medicine is built on.”

Joanna Dornfeld is a journalism senior and an intern in the CLA Office of External Relations.