Maggie Curnutte is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Program on Science, Technology & Society (STS) at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Her current research focuses on the governance of emerging biotechnologies, including direct-to-consumer genetic testing and research on human-animal mixtures. While at Harvard, Maggie is working on a National Science Foundation project with Sheila Jasanoff and colleagues called “Life in the Gray Zone: Governance of New Biology in Europe and the United States.”

At the University of Milan and while a graduate fellow in the STS Program at the Harvard Kennedy School, she wrote a dissertation on the direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing industry and its confrontations with the US Congress and Food and Drug Administration. Her comparative study of the two leading U.S. providers of DTC—23andMe and Navigenics—showed how DTC firms have challenged established norms for how we can and should relate to our genomes.

Maggie’s current research projects continue to address the governance of emerging and potentially disruptive technologies. During the fall of 2011 she participated in an international and collaborative project funded at the Harvard Kennedy School by the Greenwall Foundation to explore the constitutional foundations of bioethics. For purposes of this project she designed and carried out a case study that traces the availability of genetic testing for Alzheimer’s disease (specifically testing for ApoE status) in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Continuing with this line of research, she will spend the second half of her post-doctoral fellowship performing a comparative analysis of ethical, legal, and social responses to animal-human chimeras.

Maggie received a BA in philosophy from Pomona College in 2005 and a PhD in the Foundations and Ethics of the Life Sciences from the University of Milan in 2012. While an undergraduate she received training in molecular biology through laboratory internships at the Center for Clinical Immunology at Stanford University and DNAX Research Institute (Palo Alto, CA). Post-college she worked as a technician at The Center for Blood Research at Harvard Medical School, and as part of her graduate training continued laboratory work at The Institute for Molecular Oncology (Milan, Italy).

Publications

Curnutte, Maggie and Giuseppe Testa. “Consuming Genomes: Scientific and Social Innovation in Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing,” New Genetics and Society, forthcoming 2012.