ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the twentieth century eyebrows would have been raised at the linking of the terms ‘genetics’ and ‘society’ for a number of reasons. Both were still very much in their conceptual infancy and clearly related to inimical discourses, on the one hand of nature and science, and on the other of people and governance. The last 100 years have seen a conflation of these to the extent that, some would argue, they are now constituted and co-constructed in such complex and multidimensional ways that their linkage has become both accepted and commonplace. Genetics has come to stand as a marker for the life sciences more broadly understood: the gene is now a cultural icon. The language of DNA associated with it has entered, perhaps relatively unreflectively, into common parlance, and the message – that we now understand heredity and its implications – can be found everywhere. As an article in Nature so clearly put it, ‘gene’ is not a typical four-letter word, it is neither offensive nor bleeped out of TV shows (Pearson 2006: 399). In this introduction we explore some of the ramifications of this apparent progress through the lens of contemporary social science research, of which this volume is itself an exemplar. We do so, however, in the clear recognition that our input also forms a part of how genetics and society is being constituted. The study of genetics is a ‘broad scientific terrain, which also carries, as invisible bag-
gage, a presumed history of awkward politics and ambivalent social connections’ (Redclift and Gibbon 2006: 1) New genetic technologies and their applications in biomedicine have important implications for social identities in contemporary societies. The new genetics in medicine is increasingly important for the identification of health and disease, the imputation of personal and familial risk, and the moral status of people identified as having genetic susceptibility for inherited conditions. There are consequent transformations in national and ethnic collective identity. The body and its investigation is also potentially transformed by the possibilities of genetic investigations and modifications. These transformations include the highly controversial terrains of reproductive technologies and the use of human embryos in biomedical research (Atkinson et al. 2007). Social science research has also identified a new research system, often labelled the
‘new genetics’, viewing the gene as a mobile commodity.
