This article examines the reflexive, biosocial nature of genomic meaning making around race, drawing on discourse analysis of 732 articles on genomics and race published from the years 1986-2010, in-depth interviews with 36 of the world's most elite genomics researchers, interviews with 15 critics, policymakers, and trainees involved in debates over race, and participant observation at a core genotyping facility that specializes in ancestry estimation. I reveal how biomedical researchers identify with, value, and make sense of the taxonomies they construct. My analysis goes beyond a consideration of instrumental rationales to analyze the experiential and political motivations that shape how researchers get involved in racial ethical dilemmas. I theorize taxonomic practice as a reflexive form of biosociality, a conscious shaping of social notions about biology and race to produce a future that researchers themselves want to live in. I demonstrate how reflexive biosociality paradoxically leads researchers to advance social explanations for race while investing in genomics as a solution to racial quandaries.
One of the most commented upon puzzles of the postgenomic era is the paradox of race. When President Clinton held a press conference on June 26, 2000, to announce the completion of the first draft of the sequence of the human genome, the main message he and scientific leaders Francis Collins and Craig Venter chose to emphasize was that of universal human similarity: "in genetic terms, all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same" (quoted in Bliss 2012:1). Venter, Collins, and other leading scientists strongly stated that contemporary genetics shows race not to be a scientific concept, and that "precise racial boundaries" cannot be legitimated scientifically. Yet this apparent consensus was soon broken. Geneticists 685812A SRXXX10.
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Sociology has begun to question how new genetic sciences affect older ways of constructing and contesting social identity, including forms of identity politics that have brought women and minorities significant gains. This article presents US debates on genetics, identity politics, and race in order to theorize emergent transformations in light of the genomic revolution. Examining recent developments in the realms of pharmaceuticals and ancestry estimation, I argue that traditional forms of identity politics are still actively at work, though they are being marketized in novel ways. This article combines theories of racialization and medicalization to detail how genomics ushers in a subtle new version of identity politics: a pharmaceuticalized citizenship wherein health rights and political participation are co-envisioned in individualistic molecular terms.
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