ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the conditions of possibility of psychiatric genetics using I. Hacking’s framework of ‘styles of scientific reasoning’. It argues that the clinical, statistical and laboratory styles of reasoning made psychiatric genetics possible in the early twentieth century. The book shows how the clinical, statistical and laboratory styles of psychiatric genetics are either remotely concealed among distributed processes or organized around ‘trading zones’. It examines the disturbing legacy of German psychiatric genetics and the role that controversy has played in the discipline. The book explains the ways in which ‘mass inscription’ of high-throughput genotyping moves Big Psychiatric genetics towards a statistical style of reasoning, relying on a novel arrangement of expertise to analyse and manage large volumes of genome data. It considers how the scientific community respond to mounting criticism of their core methodology.
