Ten years after the Human Genome Project’s completion the life sciences stand in a moment of uncertainty, transition, and contestation. The postgenomic era has seen rapid shifts in research methodology, funding, scientific labor, and disciplinary structures. Postgenomics is transforming our understanding of disease and health, our environment, and the categories of race, class, and gender. At the same time, the gene retains its centrality and power in biological and popular discourse. The contributors to Postgenomics analyze these ruptures and continuities and (...) place them in historical, social, and political context. Postgenomics, they argue, forces a rethinking of the genome itself, and opens new territory for conversations between the social sciences, humanities, and life sciences. Contributors. Russ Altman, Rachel A. Ankeny, Catherine Bliss, John Dupré, Michael Fortun, Evelyn Fox Keller, Sabina Leonelli, Adrian Mackenzie, Margot Moinester, Aaron Panofsky, Sarah S. Richardson, Sara Shostak, Hallam Stevens. (shrink)

Historians of molecular biology have paid significant attention to the role of scientific instruments and their relationship to the production of biological knowledge. For instance, Lily Kay has examined the history of electrophoresis, Boelie Elzen has analyzed the development of the ultracentrifuge as an enabling technology for molecular biology, and Nicolas Rasmussen has examined how molecular biology was transformed by the introduction of the electron microscope (Kay 1998, 1993; Elzen 1986; Rasmussen 1997). 1 Collectively, these historians have demonstrated how instruments (...) and other elements of the material culture of the laboratory have played a decisive role in determining the kind and quantity of .. (shrink)

Genomics is increasingly considered a global enterprise – the fact that biological information can flow rapidly around the planet is taken to be important to what genomics is and what it can achieve. However, the large-scale international circulation of nucleotide sequence information did not begin with the Human Genome Project. Efforts to formalize and institutionalize the circulation of sequence information emerged concurrently with the development of centralized facilities for collecting that information. That is, the very first databases build for collecting (...) and sharing DNA sequence information were, from their outset, international collaborative enterprises. This paper describes the origins of the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration between GenBank in the United States, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory Databank, and the DNA Database of Japan. The technical and social groundwork for the international exchange of nucleotide sequences created the conditions of possibility for imagining nucleotide sequences as a “global” objects. The “transnationalism” of nucleotide sequence was critical to their ontology – what DNA sequences came to be during the Human Genome Project was deeply influenced by international exchange. (shrink)

Who gets to practice and participate in science? Research teams in Puerto Rico and New Zealand have each sequenced the genomes of parrot populations native to these locales: the iguaca and kākāpō, respectively. In both cases, crowdfunding and social media were instrumental in garnering public interest and funding. These forms of Internet-mediated participation impacted how conservation science was practiced in these cases and shaped emergent social roles and relations. As citizens “follow,” fund, and “like” the labor of conservation, they create (...) new relational possibilities for and with science. For example, the researchers became newly engaged and engaging by narrating and displaying the parrots via an Internet-inflected aesthetic. The visibility of online modalities shifted accountabilities as researchers considered whom this crowdfunded work answered to and how to communicate their progress and results. The affordances of the Internet allowed researchers from the peripheries of the scientific establishment to produce genomic knowledge for globally dispersed audiences. The convergence of genomic and Internet technology here shaped scientific practice by facilitating new modes of participation—for laypeople in science but also for scientists in society. (shrink)