Culture and Genetics Relationship

Culture and Genetics Relationship

Culture and Genetics Relationship

Historians have discussed many dimensions of the post-war molecularization of the life sciences. Revisiting it from the perspective of mapping practices-as this volume does-proves valuable as it helps to problematize the conventional conception of a direct line supposedly linking chromosomal genetics, postwar bacterial genetics, and the discovery of DNA. Mapping actually played a critical role in the molecularization of the gene as testified here, but the techniques used were not a direct continuation of classical genetic mapping. Further, molecularizing the gene eventually led to the recent mapping of the human genome; but again the connections are far from direct. Classical mapping was superseded in the sense that it became a problem of physical and chemical analysis. Mapping was also complemented by and juxtaposed with sequencing. As shown in this volume, these new practices did not emerge out of a continuation of classical genetics, but from another horizon, from the world of animal models and human genetics, typical of postwar biomedicine.(

Durham University Library

20100417a

Rice Genetics II_p446

Thomas, 2000)

Maps, for those who know to read them are, first of all, a means of orientation. But they also condense and depict phenomena in relation to each other. Thus, they create meaning through condensation and relating-that is, through the power of synopsis-as much as through representation and reference-that is, through the ongoing traffic between the map and the mapped territory. It has become a common observation in the history of science that models and tools have a life of their own and may profoundly transform the phenomena they are supposed to represent. As Georges Canguilhem once wrote about "life" in the laboratory: "We must not forget that the laboratory itself constitutes a new

environment in which life certainly establishes norms whose extrapolation does not work without...