ABSTRACT
This could come from almost any account of Euro-American life. It echoes the description of kin networks of the kind familiar to anthropologists since Firth and his colleagues’ (1969) classic exposition on family and kinship in London. It also echoes a recent reformulation made in the context of a historical sociology of family relationships in ‘Western’ societies (in this instance Britain and North America). Goldthorpe (1987:4-5) observes that, as kinspersons, family members are linked not as a group but as a network. They constitute a set of people to whom ‘an individual’ ought to be able ‘to turn for help and support’ and expects to do so on a reciprocal basis. Unlike other forms of assistance, such support carries the long perspective of a lifetime, and this, he suggests, is ‘the prime importance of kinship in Western [Euro-American] societies’. However, Grobstein is neither anthropologist nor sociologist. Now in a Program in Science, Technology and Public Affairs in California, he was trained in embryology and developmental biology, and I have taken his remarks from an address to a British-based conference on philosophical ethics in reproductive medicine (Bromham et al. 1990). The individual to which he was referring is not a person but the ‘individual genome’ that every person carries. He thus visualises kinship as lying between the sets of hereditary material themselves (the genomes). Grobstein produced this image in the context of an appeal to what he hoped would be taken for granted in future debate, namely the idea that the human genome is a fundamental collective property that belongs to and links all humanity. He might, therefore, have been gratified to have heard some
of the speakers in the House of Lords claim their connectedness through the identity they shared with the embryo under discussion.
