This paper addresses the issue of how the scientific discourse of genetics is expressed in local idioms. The examples used are taken from fieldwork conducted in Sri Lanka and relate principally to Sinhala Buddhist attempts to socialise `big science.' The paper explores idioms of both nature and nurture in local imagery and narratives and draws attention to the rhetorical dimensions of genetic discourses when used in context. The article concludes with a preliminary attempt to identify the ways in which explanations (...) of genetic causality are aligned with notions of karma in the explanation of illness and misfortune. (shrink)

Over the past years, one of the most contentious topics in policy debates on genetics has been the use of genetic testing in insurance. In the rush to confront concerns about potential abuses of genetic information, most countries throughout Europe and the US have enacted genetics-specific legislation for insurance. Drawing on current debates on the pros and cons of a genetics-specific legislative approach, this article offers empirical insight into how such legislation works out in insurance practice. To this end, ethnographic (...) fieldwork was done in the underwriting departments of Belgian insurance companies. Belgium was one of the first European countries introducing genetics-specific legislation in insurance. Although this approach does not allow us to speak in terms of ‘ the causal effects of the law’, it enables us to point to some developments in insurance practice that are quite different than the law’s original intentions. It will not only become clear that the Belgian genetics-specific legislation does not offer adequate solutions to the underlying issues it was intended for. We will also show that, while the legislation’s focus has been on the inadmissibility of genetic discrimination, at the same time differences are made in the insurance appraisal within the group of the asymptomatic ill. In other words, by giving exclusive legal protection to the group of genetic risks, other non-genetic risk groups are unintendedly being under-protected. From a policy point of view, studying genetics-specific legislation is especially valuable because it forces us to return to first principles: Which risks deserve our legal protection in insurance? Who do we declare our solidarity with? (shrink)

Today it is possible to screen for mutated DNA sequences which do not induce any diseases but predispose to develop diseases under certain environmental condition. These latter disorders are called multifactorial since they result from the interplay of genetic and environmental factors. Among multifactorial disorders there are job-related diseases whose genetic component can be identified by genetic screening tests. The use of these tests to predict occupational disorders, to cut down on them, and to save costs—in particular for absenteeism, health (...) care, and lawsuits—is of interest to employers and insurers. As for employees, it could entail an extremely deep invasion of privacy, economic problems and, very likely, a jeopardy of the present position of the individual who may be screened even if his/her potential disease is never developed. (shrink)

Senior molecular geneticists were interviewed about their perceptions of the ethical and social implications of genetic knowledge. Inductive analysis of these interviews identified a number of strategies through which the scientists negotiated their moral responsibilities as they participated in generating knowledge that presents difficult ethical questions. These strategies included: further analysis and application of scientific method; clarification of multiple roles; negotiation with the public through public debate, institutional processes of funding, ethics committees and legislation; and personal responsibility.

Fred Sanger, the inventor of the first protein, RNA and DNA sequencing methods, has traditionally been seen as a technical scientist, engaged in laboratory bench work and not interested at all in intellectual debates in biology. In his autobiography and commentaries by fellow researchers, he is portrayed as having a trajectory exclusively dependent on technological progress. The scarce historical scholarship on Sanger partially challenges these accounts by highlighting the importance of professional contacts, institutional and disciplinary moves in his career, spanning (...) from 1940 to 1983. This paper will complement such literature by focusing, for the first time, on the transition of Sanger’s sequencing strategies from degrading to copying the target molecule, which occurred in the late 1960s as he was shifting from protein and RNA to DNA sequencing, shortly after his move from the Department of Biochemistry to the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, both based in Cambridge (UK). Through a reinterpretation of Sanger’s papers and retrospective accounts and a pioneering investigation of his laboratory notebooks, I will claim that sequencing shifted from the working procedures of organic chemistry to those of the emergent molecular biology. I will also argue that sequencing deserves a history in its own right as a practice and not as a technique subordinated to the development of molecular biology or genomics. My proposed history of sequencing leads to a reappraisal of current STS debates on bioinformatics, biotechnology and biomedicine. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to quickly sketch a teleological approach to the problem of isolating the impact of genes on phenotypic characters. I begin by arguing that it is a mistake to think that there will be only one analysis of genetic input suitable for all theoretical interests. My principle focus is Richard Dawkins' argument for genic selectionism. I argue that a teleological analysis of genetic input is what Dawkins requires to establish the right kind of mapping of (...) gene onto phenotype. This comes at a certain cost, however. Accepting the analysis will threaten Dawkins' claims about the teleogogical priority of gene over phenotype. (shrink)

In the advertising discourse of human genetic database projects, of genetic ancestry tracing companies, and in popular books on anthropological genetics, what I refer to as the anthropological gene and genome appear as documents of human history, by far surpassing the written record and oral history in scope and accuracy as archives of our past. How did macromolecules become "documents of human evolutionary history"? Historically, molecular anthropology, a term introduced by Emile Zuckerkandl in 1962 to characterize the study of primate (...) phylogeny and human evolution on the molecular level, asserted its claim to the privilege of interpretation regarding hominoid, hominid, and human phylogeny and evolution vis-à-vis other historical sciences such as evolutionary biology, physical anthropology, and paleoanthropology. This process will be discussed on the basis of three key conferences on primate classification and evolution that brought together exponents of the respective fields and that were held in approximately ten-years intervals between the early 1960s and the 1980s. I show how the anthropological gene and genome gained their status as the most fundamental, clean, and direct records of historical information, and how the prioritizing of these epistemic objects was part of a complex involving the objectivity of numbers, logic, and mathematics, the objectivity of machines and instruments, and the objectivity seen to reside in the epistemic objects themselves. (shrink)