The rise of genomic technologies has catalyzed shifts in the health care landscape through the commercialization of genome sequencing and testing services in the genomics marketplace. The development of consumer genomics into a growing array of information technologies aimed at collecting, curating, and broadly sharing personal data and biological materials reconstitutes the meaning of health and reframes patients into biocitizens. In this context, the good biocitizen is expected to assume personal responsibility for health through consumption of genomic information and (...) acquiescence to public and private efforts at data surveillance and aggregation. These shifts raise fundamental questions about how competing interests of the public, the state, and corporate entities will be reconciled and what trade‐offs are demanded for the promise of precision health. (shrink)

My fundamental argument is that a collective concept of race that presumes that there are, or were at some point in the past, discreet genetic groups that have tracked along continental lines and that those differences are the fundamental basis for our folk and political groupings of white, black, Asian, Native American, and Pacific Islander is a fallacy that will always lead to social inequality. Such an understanding of race currently reverberates through genetic science, but for social and political reasons, (...) and with good intentions. But if we want to move toward a social order that promotes social justice, all of us across the sciences, throughout health policy, and in the wider public will need to reconceptualize race in terms of legacies of discrimination. We will need to shift our focus from molecular differences to social and political differences, especially when we conduct gene‐environment analyses. (shrink)

Mirroring the set of questions explored in the special report in which this essay appears and through a critical Cree standpoint, this essay poses three provocations intended to upend habits of thought relative to notions of goodness, biocitizenship, and the democratization of scientific pursuit. Styled as foreplay, the essay warms the reader up to the desirable possibility of being a bad biocitizen. I briefly establish the colonial conditions under which the fields of genomic science, biomedical research, and bioethics have been (...) made possible. I then offer Indigenous Science, Technology, and Society as an alternative project aimed at disturbing the territorial, political, and morally inflected claims of nation‐states and their citizens, research institutions and their researchers, and bioeconomies and their consumers to continue to possess Indigenous territories and to study Indigenous bodies while controlling the bioethical principles, protocols, and policies for doing so. The work of Indigenous STS seeks to break down the bounded knowledges of disciplinary reason and map the networked interrelations of problems inhibiting and solutions strengthening the empowerment of Indigenous peoplehoods. (shrink)