While the sequencing of the human genome was a landmark achievement, the availability and manipulation of such a vast amount of data about our species has inevitably led to questions that are increasingly fundamental and urgent: now that information about human bodies can be transformed into a natural resource, how will and should we interpret and use it? With The Postgenomic Condition, Jenny Reardon draws on more than a decade of research in molecular biology labs, commercial startups, governmental agencies and civic spaces to examine the extensive efforts after the completion of the Human Genome Project to transform genomics from high tech informatics practiced by a few well-financed scientists and engineers to meaningful knowledge beneficial to all people. Through her in-depth profiles of genomic initiatives around the world, we see hopes to forge public knowledge and goods from blood and DNA meet the reality of limited resources and conflicting values. Building the argument around the limits of liberal concepts of openness, information, inclusion, privacy, property and the public concepts that proved salient at different points in the unfolding story of efforts to make sense of human genomes Reardon shows how genomics challenges us to move beyond existing liberal frameworks to ask deeper questions of knowledge and justice. While the news media is filled with grand visions of future designer drugs and babies, The Postgenomic Condition brings richly into view these hard on-the-ground questions about what can be known and who and how we will live on a depleted but data-rich, interconnected yet fractured planet, where technoscience garners disproportionate resources.

In the summer of 1991, population geneticists and evolutionary biologists proposed to archive human genetic diversity by collecting the genomes of "isolated indigenous populations." Their initiative, which became known as the Human Genome Diversity Project, generated early enthusiasm from those who believed it would enable huge advances in our understanding of human evolution. However, vocal criticism soon emerged. Physical anthropologists accused Project organizers of reimporting racist categories into science. Indigenous-rights leaders saw a "Vampire Project" that sought the blood of indigenous people but not their well-being. More than a decade later, the effort is barely off the ground.

How did an initiative whose leaders included some of biology's most respected, socially conscious scientists become so stigmatized? How did these model citizen-scientists come to be viewed as potential racists, even vampires?

This book argues that the long abeyance of the Diversity Project points to larger, fundamental questions about how to understand knowledge, democracy, and racism in an age when expert claims about genomes increasingly shape the possibilities for being human. Jenny Reardon demonstrates that far from being innocent tools for fighting racism, scientific ideas and practices embed consequential social and political decisions about who can define race, racism, and democracy, and for what ends. She calls for the adoption of novel conceptual tools that do not oppose science and power, truth and racist ideologies, but rather draw into focus their mutual constitution.

Investigations into the interplay of biological and legal conceptions of life, from government policies on cloning to DNA profiling by law enforcement. Legal texts have been with us since the dawn of human history. Beginning in 1953, life too became textual. The discovery of the structure of DNA made it possible to represent the basic matter of life with permutations and combinations of four letters of the alphabet, A, T, C, and G. Since then, the biological and legal conceptions of life have been in constant, mutually constitutive interplay-the former focusing on life's definition, the latter on life's entitlements. Reframing Rights argues that this period of transformative change in law and the life sciences should be considered "bioconstitutional." Reframing Rights explores the evolving relationship of biology, biotechnology, and law through a series of national and cross-national case studies. Sheila Jasanoff maps out the conceptual territory in a substantive editorial introduction, after which the contributors offer "snapshots" of developments at the frontiers of biotechnology and the law. Chapters examine such topics as national cloning and xenotransplant policies; the politics of stem cell research in Britain, Germany, and Italy; DNA profiling and DNA databases in criminal law; clinical trials in India and the United States; the GM crop controversy in Britain; and precautionary policymaking in the European Union. These cases demonstrate changes of constitutional significance in the relations among human bodies, selves, science, and the state.