ABSTRACT

This is a book about how and why different sorts of publics, predominantly in the UK, are debating, engaging with, human genetics1 and what they are saying and doing. Human genetics is impacting on the public sphere in many different settings, in specific contexts such as genetic testing, and is increasingly the catalyst for public engagement. People tend to construct – ‘frame’ – human genetics in terms of their existing personal points of view, their political and cultural frameworks, their ‘lifeworlds’ (Habermas 1987). They encounter human genetics as individuals, as members of different campaign groups and communities, through policy initiatives, through the media and so on. Drawing on project work during 2003-7, the book provides situated examples of how different publics in Britain are encountering and framing the debates on ‘human genetics’. The theory of framing was first developed by Goffman (1974). A ‘frame’ is

an interpretive schemata that simplifies and condenses the ‘world out there’ by selectively punctuating and encoding objects, situations, events, experiences, and sequences of action within one’s present and past environment.