ABSTRACT
These days, I have less and less time to think. Indeed, I rarely do more than review papers, grants or books, or process emails and memos and attend to other bits of administrative twaddle. For this reason, being asked to read the chapters in this book and to actually think about and comment on them is not only an honour, but also a luxury. So how do these pieces fit together for me? On one very obvious level, the research reported here very clearly and elegantly illustrates the increasing reach of genetics in the twenty-first century. The different chapters describe how genetic testing has come to cut across cultural and national boundaries and, in the process, is changing the ways in which we think about our bodies, identity, health, illness, risk, causation and so forth. At the same time, the contributors to this volume demonstrate how social research on genetic approaches to breast cancer (BRCA genetics) cuts across a number of intellectual and disciplinary boundaries. This is indeed a multidisciplinary collection. However, for me, the most important thing about this book is how the authors play (directly and indirectly) with the notion of categorization. This collection demonstrates not only how different cultural contexts have come to alter the ways in which BRCA identities are taken up or played out, but also how the practices of breast cancer genetics are problematizing some discrete categories and, as a result, are eroding or blurring some relatively entrenched dichotomies, such as traditional and modern (Macdonald, this volume), social and material (Pelters, this volume), individual and group (Mozersky and Gibbon, this volume), research and care (Lee, this volume), genetic and nongenetic (Bourret, Keating and Cambrosio, this volume).
