Genetic research increasingly dominates medical thought and
practice in the United States and in many other industrialized
nations. Susan Lindee's original study explores the institutions,
disciplines, and ideas that initiated the reconfiguration of
genetic medicine from a marginal field in the mid-1950s to a core
research frontier of biomedicine.
Tracing the work of geneticists and other experts in identifying
and classifying disease during the explosive period between 1950
and 1980, Lindee identifies the individual "moments of truth" that
moved the field away from its eugenic past to the center of a new
world view in which nearly all disease is understood to be
fundamentally genetic. She suggests that these moments of truth
were experienced not only by scientists but also by those who had
familial, intimate, emotional knowledge of hereditary disease:
patients, family members, and research subjects.
Focusing on benchmarks in the field--such as the rise of
neonatal testing in the 1960s, genetic studies of unique human
populations such as the Amish, the development of human
cytogenetics and human behavioral genetics, and the efforts to find
genes for rare diseases such as familial dysautonomia--she tracks
the emergence of a biomedical consensus that nearly all disease is
genetic disease.
Using the success of this field as a point of entry, Lindee
chronicles both the production of knowledge in biomedicine and
changes in the cultural meaning of the body in the late twentieth
century. She suggests that scientific knowledge is a community
project that is shaped directly by people in many different social
and professional locations. The power to experience and report
scientific truth may be much more dispersed than it sometimes
appears, because people know things about their own bodies, and
their knowledge has often been incorporated into the technical
infrastructure of genomic medicine.
Lindee's pathbreaking study shows the interdependence of
technical and social parameters in contemporary biomedicine.
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