ABSTRACT

If, as C.Wright Mills (1970) suggested, the essential project of sociology is to use the imagination to ‘grasp history and biography and the relations between the two in society’, we must accept his stricture to uncover the relationships between ‘the personal troubles of milieu’ and ‘the public issues of social structure’. This means that we must ‘range from the most personal and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self’. Mapping and sequencing the human genome, while constituting an example of de Solla Price’s (1963) ‘big science’ project, is unlike many of the new technologies in that it directly affects all of us at a very personal level. It poses a threat to the boundary between ourselves and the world in a way quite different from, for example, the virtual realities of the new electronic technologies (Bloomfield and Verdubakis 1995; S.G.Jones 1995; Glasner 1996), which only temporarily liberate individuals from their particular social and biological characteristics (gender, class, ethnicity, age and so on).