Synopsis
The much heralded "completion" of the human genome project in the year 2000 raises urgent questions: Do we now have a map of who we are? How will we control the uses of the potentially healing but also likely destructive and highly marketable information genetics brings us? Using her own life as well as her research, Barbara Katz Rothman presents an impassioned defense for the theory that humans are not "ready made from the factory," as one recent popular book on genetics put it, but social beings who grow, mature, and learn who they are.
The new genetics and race, illness, and procreation. Scientists are racing to unravel the code of life in our DNA sequences. But once we know the code, will we know what life means? Will we know what to do with the powerful-healing, destructive, and marketable-information we will have? Barbara Katz Rothman's warm, learned, passionate, and humorous voice is just the one we need to guide us through some of the most loaded issues and technologies of our time-ones that bear on the most intimate aspects of our lives. Her astute observations about the new genetics are combined with personal reflections: about raising a black child; the risks of cancer; midwives and pregnancy; the social web into which we are born; motherhood; time, growth, chance, and all the indefinable things that make us human. She helps us to think about the place of genetic science in our own lives, its role in our social world, and how we choose to think about human life itself. A genetic map will take us places, but we need an imagination to see the relationship between DNA and public policy, between genes and the society we live in, and to understand why human life can't be reduced to genetics. Rothman inspires that imagination, in a book that is essential reading.
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About the Author
Barbara Katz Rothman is a professor of sociology at the City University of New York. Her previous books include The Book of Life (Beacon / 0451-0 / $16.00 pb), Recreating Motherhood, The Tentative Pregnancy, and In Labor. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and the youngest of their three children.
From Kirkus Reviews
An outspoken and well-spoken sociologist (City University of New York Graduate School) takes on the biomedical establishment in this collection of essays on genes, race, disease, eugenics, procreation, and the future. Rothman, whose earlier books probed the medicalization of motherhood, prenatal testing and surrogacy/adoption/parenthood, here attacks the Human Genome Project. This multibillion-dollar federal initiative to map and sequence all 100,000 human genes is fraught with dangers, she saysnot the least of which is a new eugenics of designer babies. Rothman reviews the old eugenics movement, declaring it to be frankly racist, and she skillfully disposes of latter-day Bell Curve arguments. Her central point is that science is promulgating an all-in-the-genes model of biological determinism, and as an example she points to current medical thinking that all cancer is genetic. She claims that we live ``in an era of looking downtelling individuals to eat more wisely, slather on the skin protectors,'' and she sees the search for susceptibility genes as just another focus on what is wrong with the individual and not with society or the environment. When it comes to the future, Rothman trots out the slippery-slope scenarios but seems less concerned about cloning. Instead, she simply says we could spend money a lot more wisely than on the genome projectwhile ignoring what the genetic enterprise has yielded in terms of understanding evolution, developmental biology, aging, and the human brain. Rothman's empathy, warmth, and intelligence are everywhere apparent, but in painting biology with a reductionist brush that dismisses selfhood or ``soul,'' she confuses scientific practice with what scientists think and overlooks the fact that there are many geneticists who know that genes are not causal and there is more to life than molecular biology. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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