ABSTRACT
Over the last two decades, life in Western societies has come to be characterized by a prevailing consciousness of ‘risk’ (Beck 1992). As in other areas of life, risk has become the dominant way to describe, organize and practise health, and it is a central organizing concept in public health practices that focus on screening and early detection of disease (Lupton 1995, 1999; Petersen and Lupton 1996). Alongside this entrenchment in our consciousness of risks to health, genetics has emerged as a dominant mode of thinking about health, disease and personal identity at the beginning of the 21st century (Fox Keller 2000; Nelkin 1992). It is often asserted that the genetics ‘revolution’, marked by the completion of the Human Genome Project (which in 2000 succeeded in sequencing the entire human genome before its projected timeline), will fundamentally transform how biomedical research is conducted and how health care is practised and organized (Bunton and Petersen 2005; Gottweis 2005).
