Synopses & Reviews
This book is based on an ethnography of laboratory practice and explores issues around standardization, naturalisation and diversity.
Review
"...this book is STS at its best....For those skeptical of STS's ability to explore broader ethical and political questions, this book might very well convince them that STS has much to contribue not despite its focus on laboratory work but precisely because of it." - CJS Online, Jose Lopez, University of Ottawa
Synopsis
The Human Genome Diversity Project was an important and controversial programme of research arising from the debates surrounding the mapping of the human genome. This book focuses on core practices, technologies and objects in studies of diversity and examines how they help to produce genetic similarities and differences. As well as offering unique insights into day-to-day scientific practice, the book brings a wide range of perspectives to bear on our understanding of the contemporary life sciences and their social implications.
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Human Genome Diversity Project; 1. Technologies of populations: making differences and similarities between Turkish and Dutch males; 3. Ten chimps in a laboratory: or how a human genetic marker may become a good genetic marker for typing chimps; 4. Naturalisation of a reference sequence: Anderson or the Mitochondrial Eve of modern genetics; 5. The traffic in males and other stories on the enactment of the sexes in studies of genetic lineage; 6. Technologies of similarity and difference or how to do politics with DNA.