The Human Genome Project: Past, Present, and Future Anterior

This paper re-reads several important events that have been historicized as “origins” of the Human Genome Project (HGP), arguing that historians of the HGP have deployed methods and logics that are homologous to those of contemporary genetics. Each relies on sequences that can be faithfully reproduced, and privileges nuclear control while marginalizing complex networks and interactions. While the writing of both history and biology seem to demand and display unidirectional causality, in the end they each have to rely, indirectly, on a future that has yet to arrive yet, already structures the past and present.

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Notes

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  29. Produced WGBH in Boston, this “Nova” program was titled “The Book of Life”, and originally aired on public broadcasting stations on Halloween, October 31, 1989. Google Scholar
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  36. DeLisi, “The Human Genome Project” (cit. n. 15), p. 489. The question of what time-zone a “collective imagination” resides in is one I will have to defer. But I would like to add a note of appreciation and even praise for the BOGSATiated histories that I critique. The Santa Fe meeting, as DeLisi’s description here suggests, is noteworthy not only for having enlarged the community that was part of the discussion, but for changing the sociality of the discussion as well. Reading down the long list of participants, one sees that there were not only far more people at the Santa Fe meeting than at either the Alta or Santa Cruz meetings, but that there was a good mix of scientists famous and obscure, representing diverse disciplines and practices, from universities, corporations, and government laboratories — and there was a better percentage of women present (4 women and 39 men) than there were at Alta (19 men; see Cook-Deegan, “The Alta Summit”) or at Santa Cruz (where Helen Donis-Keller was the sole woman among 18 participants; see Sinsheimer, “Historical Sketch”). Whether or not this tells us anything about various cultures of research within DOE or other communities, or about gender and molecular genetics more broadly, are questions for further interviewing. I only note the fact that such suggestive starting points for inquiry can be extracted from BOGSAT accounts, and that the organizers of the Santa Fe workshop seem to deserve some credit for achieving a degree of diversity, for whatever reasons, that other “origin” events did not. For the list of Santa Fe participants, see Mark Bitensky, Sequencing the Human Genome: Summary Report of the Santa Fe Workshop, March 3–4, 1986, Office of Health and Environmental Research, U.S. Department of Energy (Los Alamos National Laboratory, 1986 ). Google Scholar
  37. Kevles, “Out of Eugenics” (cit. n. 11), p. 19. Google Scholar
  38. Author’s interview with Robert Moyzis, October 22, 1991. Google Scholar
  39. My reading here is no doubt influenced by having been on the line too long with Avital Ronell, who suggests that the historian’s job is akin to that of the switchboard operator: “When I’m on the job, I shall try to make a connection on a somewhat complicated switchboard that always threatens to jam up. This will be no reading of the Purities, but an attempt to move back and forth between what lights up before us. This includes the call from the past which tries to disguise its voice while at the same time telling us that the future is on the line. Nothing happens on this switchboard that does not announce itself as coming from the future”. Avital Ronell, Finitude’s Score: Essays for the End of the Millenium (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), p. 221. See also Ronell’s extended reading of the telephone’s nervous systems, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech ( Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989 ). Google Scholar
  40. See Roger Lewin, “Proposal to Sequence the Human Genome Stirs Debate”, Science 232 (1986), 1598–1600; and idem, “Molecular Biology of Homo sapiens”, Science 233 (1986) pp. 157–8. ArticleGoogle Scholar
  41. Cook-Deegan, The Gene Wars (cit. n. 13), pp. 110–13. Google Scholar
  42. See Sheldon Krimsky, Genetic Alchemy: The Social History of the Recombinant DNA Controversy ( Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982 ). Google Scholar
  43. Cook-Deegan, The Gene Wars (cit. n. 13), p. 113. Google Scholar
  44. Author’s transcript of taped discussion at Cold Spring Harbor meeting, “The Molecular Biology of Homo sapiens”, June 1986; tape recording made by C. Thomas Caskey and deposited by Robert Cook-Deegan at the Human Genome Archive, National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature, Georgetown University, Washington, DC. Google Scholar
  45. Walter Gilbert, “Towards a Paradigm Shift in Biology”, Nature 349 (January l0, 1991), p. 99. The article also serves to mark the long distance between the days of Thomas Kuhn, when paradigm shifts were accounted for centuries after their occurrence, and today’s anticipation of them. Google Scholar
  46. For an analysis of this shift in legitimating arguments for the Human Genome Project from the “Holy Grail” to the “Route One of Genetics”, see Fortun, Making and Mapping Genes and Histories (cit. n. 5), Chapter 5; see also Fortun and Herbert J. Bernstein, Muddling Through: Pursuing Science and Truths in the 21’ Century (Washington, DC: Counterpoint Press, 1998), Chapter 7, “Producing Multiplicities: Inquiry Infrastructures for Molecular Genetics”. Google Scholar
  47. Richard Doyle, On Beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations of the Life Sciences ( Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997 ), p. 75. Google Scholar
  48. Ibid., p. 76. Google Scholar
  49. Ibid., p. 78. Google Scholar
  50. Evelyn Fox Keller, Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1995 ), pp. 6–7. Google Scholar
  51. Ibid., pp. 10–11. Google Scholar
  52. Ibid., pp. 21–22. Google Scholar
  53. Cited in Doyle, On Beyond Living (cit. n. 47), p. 77. Google Scholar
  54. Paul Forman, “Inventing the Maser in Postwar America”, Osiris 7 (2nd series, 1992), pp. 105134, on p. 129. Google Scholar

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  1. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA Michael A. Fortun
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  1. Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, USA Garland E. Allen
  2. University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia Roy M. MacLeod

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Fortun, M.A. (2001). The Human Genome Project: Past, Present, and Future Anterior. In: Allen, G.E., MacLeod, R.M. (eds) Science, History and Social Activism. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 228. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2956-7_20

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