Reordering Life: An Ethnography of the Human Genome Project

Cornell University, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

The human genome project has become a site of significant conceptual, institutional, and social changes-both in science and in society more broadly. Genome research has generated and catalogued vast quantities of biological information, an enterprise intended to bring new order to biological knowledge and to extend human control over the molecular machinery of life. Genome research has also reordered the institutional life of laboratories, changing scientific practices, technology, work, and the identities of researchers. In addition, genome research has produced new patterns of scientific exchange and forms of property, redrawing the boundaries between "public" and "private" science in complex and nuanced ways. Because these interconnected conceptual, institutional, and social changes are likely to have far-reaching consequences, the processes that produced them merit scholarly attention. This research will complete a long-term, prospective ethnographic study of the genome mapping and sequencing community. The study began in 1988 and has followed the genome project since before its official launching in 1990. Using interviews and participant observation, field research has been conducted in genome mapping and sequencing laboratories, scientific meetings, advisory committees, and commercial firms, mainly in the United States but also in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. Funding will support the final rounds of fieldwork and interviewing and the analysis needed to support the completion of a book-length manuscript, tentatively titled REORDERING LIFE, that will analyze the changes in knowledge and social order that have characterized the human genome project, and that-all indications suggest-have only just begun.