ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some of the broad challenges facing health care and bioethics in the wake of the 'genomic turn' in medicine. The analysis is used as a possible entry-point for inserting the biopolitical analysis into the bioethical discourse. To start with the discussion is situated within the context of genetic diagnosis and counselling, where it is shown how the notions of informed consent and autonomy emerge as central policy-tools. The chapter argues that the post-genomic era raises serious challenges for bioethics, and that these challenges articulate and strengthen already existing weaknesses in the field's central concepts. Hygiene, social medicine and epidemiology are all central expressions of biopower and biopolitics. The chapter also shows how autonomy and informed consent have emerged as necessary although somewhat problematic policy tools on the interface between biomedicine and society. It considers some (mainly) neo-Foucauldian conceptions of biopolitics and their possible contributions to the problem complex.
