ABSTRACT
What values does bioinformation accrue as it travels from bodies to databases and across societal domains? In the contemporary United States, social inequalities are reflected in the make-up of genetic databases and in bioinformation itself and discrepancies in the representation of specific groups in genetic data acquire different values across medical, consumer, and legal contexts. Contrasting instances in which the diversity of genetic data is valued with those in which it is not, this chapter tracks how diversity is ascribed to data in American medicine and forensics. In medicine, in a paradigm of racial genetics, diversity marks the DNA of ethnic and racial minorities while signaling redemptive biocapitalist health projects for disadvantaged groups. In forensics, non-coding DNA marks a probabilistic genetics while experts aspire to a universal database as a solution to racial bias in the federal DNA database. These contexts engender not just different epistemologies of DNA but overlapping racial politics of diversity and colorblindness. Neither diverse data nor data that lack diversity are thus stable entities. Rather, competing universalisms characterize genetics’ current totalizing expansion across domains of American life.
