ABSTRACT

Focusing on personal genomics services (in particular 23andMe and deCODEme 1 ) which offer personal services to people who wish to assess genetic risks for common diseases and to explore geographies of ancestry, this chapter extends the notions of labour and relations of production beyond ‘natural’ resources in the classical sense to the extraction, reproduction, and exchange of bodily material and information, to biosocial relations of production (Palsson 2009a). People who subscribe to personal genomics services tend to be seen as engaging in either recreation or consumption, not in labour activities. While a growing body of literature has drawn attention to the labour carried out by women in the context of artificial reproduction (see, for instance, Dickenson 2009), a similar perspective has not been developed with respect to personal genomics. I suggest that the labour carried out when subscribing to personal genomics services largely goes unrecognised in both the industry and the pertinent literature and that this needs to be rectified. If one takes this perspective seriously, one is bound to ask how such labour contributions can be properly acknowledged and rewarded and what kinds of regimes of governance and property this would entail. This is particularly acute if one considers the growing evidence of relational, entangled bodies recently accumulated by epigenetics, macrobiotics, and related fields.