Genetic Maps and Human Imaginations: The Limits of Science in Understanding Who We 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.

Barbara Katz Rothman is professor of sociology at Baruch College and CUNY Graduate School. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. She has won the American Sociological Association's Jesse Barnard Award for distinguished contributions to the field, is president of Sociologists for Women in Society, and was a recent past president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. She is the author of Recreating Motherhood, In Labor, and The Tentative Pregnancy, all available from Norton.