ABSTRACT
The past hundred years have been called ‘the century of the gene’ (Keller 2000). For decades, the idea of genes as biological building blocks, as material determinants transmitted from one generation to the next has ruled the minds of geneticists, eugenicists and psychiatrists. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the search for this ‘quasi-mythical entity’ (Keller 2000, 143) has come to a stuttering end. By now, research on the complexity of the genome rebuts the hypothesis of genes as stable, functionally definable, discrete and causal hereditary factors. Today many geneticists publicly admit what the geneticist Johannsen, who coined the term gene, clarified as early as 1913: the idea of material factors which determine characters and traits, ‘must be dismissed not only as naïve, but also as totally misguided’ (Johannsen 1913, 144).1 From the point of view of contemporary genetics it has become obvious that announcements of the identification of the ‘gene for’ boozing, stupidity, a fat belly or going gaga have been nothing more than a series of sensational fictions.
