Genomics with Care: Minding the Double Binds of Science

by Mike Fortun

Overview

In Genomics with Care Mike Fortun presents an experimental ethnography of contemporary genomics, analyzing science as a complex amalgam of cognition and affect, formal logics and tacit knowledge, statistics, and ethics. Fortun examines genomics in terms of care—a dense composite of affective and cognitive forces that drive scientists and the relations they form with their objects of research, data, knowledge, and community. Reading genomics with care shows how each resists definition yet is so entangled as to become indistinguishable. Fortun analyzes four patterns of genomic care—curation, scrupulousness, solicitude, and friendship—seen in the conceptual, technological, social, and methodological changes that transpired as the genetics of the 1980s became the genomics of the 1990s, and then the “post-genomics” of the 2000s. By tracing the dense patterns made where care binds to science, Fortun shows how these patterns mark where scientists are driven to encounter structural double binds that are impossible to resolve, and yet are where scientific change and creativity occur.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478024521
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	06/30/2023
Series:	Experimental Futures
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	360
File size:	10 MB

About the Author

Mike Fortun is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Promising Genomics: Iceland and deCODE Genetics in a World of Speculation.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  vii
Poem-Like Tolls 1: A Prelude  1
Part I. Genomics, Double Binds, Affects
1. Fors  13
2. Labyrinth Life: Affect Excess Infrastructure  42
3. Double Binds of Science  80
Poem-Like Tolls 2: An Interlude
Part II. Minding the Infrastructure of Genomics
4. Curation: Of Data’s Limits  111
5. Scrupulousness: Of Experiment’s Limit  141
6. Solicitude: Of Science’s Limit  183
7. Friendship: Of Community’s Limits  221
Poem-Like Tolls 3: An Appendix  253
Postscript  259
Notes  277
Works Cited  311
Index  337

Editorial Reviews

“Genomics with Care is an inventive, generous, funny, rigorous, and path-opening contribution to the anthropology of science that teaches readers new methods of understanding science as a vocation. Mike Fortun deftly fuses attention to the social affects and effects that accompany research in today’s molecular biology. This utterly splendid book reminds us what science and science studies are for.”

-- Stefan Helmreich, author of A Book of Waves

“This brilliant and much-needed intervention into science and technology studies provides an affecting model for reading not just genomics, but the sciences in general. It opens a new path for thinking and writing differently in relation to the natural sciences. Indeed, it is a superb model for scholars and students who wish to read any text, community, or epistemology in a caring and critical way.”

-- Elizabeth A. Wilson, author of Gut Feminism

"While scientific practice is often thought to be devoid of affective influence from practitioners, it is nonetheless a human endeavor and often defenseless against the affective nature of the human condition. Fortun employs the scientific literature as a source of observational data to produce an ethnographic exploration of the process of science within the context of genomics research. . . . . Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals."

-- J. A. Hewlett Choice

From the Publisher