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Genetic
Maps and Human Imaginations: The Limits of Science in Understanding Who
We Are Reviewed by Karen-Sue Taussig
This intensely personal foray into social aspects of genetics is alternately fascinating and frustrating. Barbara Katz Rothman tells us that "[a]ll knowledge is knowledge from somewhere. Every way of knowing the world is grounded, placed, located" (13). She is concerned, in this book, to explore how genetics is grounded, placed, located in contemporary society, specifically (and more implicitly than an anthropologist might like) the United States. Clearing the ground for a feminist perspective, she argues that genetics "isn't just a science; it is a way of thinking. . . . Genetic thinking . . . [is] an ideology for our time, [it] is about seeds. Genetics is the most obvious and direct scientific descendent of this traditional, father-based worldview, an attempt to understand the very meaning of life by understanding genes, bits of DNA, the updated version of seeds" (p. 18). For Katz Rothman, this masculinist science has a significant and less than positive influence on three aspects of social life of particular concern and around which she organizes her book: race, illness, and procreation. Katz Rothman devotes a section of her book to each of these three
areas of social life. Her discussions range widely, drawing on
eloquent descriptions of a wide array of personal experiences
and others' scholarship. In the section on race Katz Rothman argues
that recent developments in molecular biology serve to shore up
already existing social inequalities based on race by appearing
to provide scientific evidence for genetic determinism. In the
section on illness she focuses on the problem of thinking genetically
when it comes to diseases, such as cancer, which have a genetic
component but are not simply genetic. She argues that thinking
genetically elides social factors such as demography that also
affect whether a given individual gets cancer at a given time.
Finally, in the section on procreation Katz Rothman interrogates
the notion of choice that underlies pre-natal diagnosis
for genetic conditions. She questions the distinction many, particularly
bioethicists, seek to make between acceptable and unacceptable
uses of technology by examining the construction of medical conditions
as opposed to non-medical ones. She argues that the choices individuals
make in regard to these new reproductive technologies should be
examined not at the level of the individual but at the level of
"the social context, the world in which that decision is
made" (p. 201) as a means of illustrating the range of genetic
"conditions" that may come to be considered appropriate
for interventions such as pre-natal diagnosis.
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