Colloquium Society, Environment, Biology - Jenny Reardon (University of California)

"Just Genomes?"

Jenny Reardon
(University of California, Santa Cruz)

At the end of the last millennium, the proposal of the Human Genome Diversity Project and the publication of The Bell Curve sparked new worries that studies of human genetic variation would reignite scientific racism. Since World War II, human geneticists had labored to distance the study of human genes from eugenics and race science under the NS regime. Would that work, and the possibility of a genomic account of human differences, be undone before the research had even really begun? To avert this possibility, in the wake of the sequencing of the human genome—or the postgenomic era—genome scientists and their supporters proposed a new 'democratic' approach to genomics. In several high profile cases, they attempted to give power back to "the people" to define themselves, and to control use of their DNA. Yet the problem of race and racism persisted. From the International HapMap Project, to David Reich's recent editorial in the New York Times, this talk explores how and by what means debates about "race" and racism remain central and formative of the postgenomic condition. 

The colloquium is organized by the Chair in Science and Technology Studies. More information about the colloquium is available here

https://www.ucf.uni-freiburg.de/people/chair-in-science-and-technology-studies/events-sts/colloquium-summer-2018