A Birthday Present
Georgia, my middle daughter of three, is a combination of my DNA and identity release[1] donor #2817[2]. Unlike her sisters who both have the advantage of knowing their sperm donors in real time (both friends of mine), Georgia’s donor can only be revealed to her next year when she turns 18. There is a …
This article is part of the following series: Diagnostic stories
Routine collection of blood samples from neonates – often using so-called Guthrie cards (pictured) – began in the 1960s when a number of North American and European countries set up screening programmes for phenylketonuria, a rare single-gene disorder which leads to developmental delays and early death if untreated. Such programmes have since been introduced in many other countries around the …
This month saw breaking news web-wide on one aspect of medicine that has drawn critiques and support from both social scientists and biomedical experts: clinical trials. Drug trials overseen by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) (see clinicaltrials.gov) and often executed by research universities and hospitals rarely if ever include major segments of the United States population. …
This article is part of the following series: Book forum
In The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genome, Alondra Nelson traces the multiple ways in which genetic testing and related technologies have become entangled in contemporary debates, projects, politics, and interventions surrounding race in the United States. This wide-ranging and incisive book manages the difficult task of being a key addition to the scholarly …
Throughout Alondra Nelson’s book The Social Life of DNA, we learn that what matters about genetic ancestry testing is not the extent of its scientific accuracy or its efficacy in achieving the goals to which it is applied, but rather where and how it focuses our attention. Genetic ancestry thus is not only a technology that can be used …
As someone who has written rather skeptically about commercial Personal Genomic History services targeting African American consumers, what I find most remarkable about Nelson’s book is her intellectual honesty. Nelson goes to great length in demonstrating how the “master’s tools” (in this case genomic technologies and their inferential architectures) might be mobilized – not so much to dismantle the master’s …