Experiencing the New Genetics: Family and Kinship on the Medical Frontier

by Kaja Finkler

Over the past several decades there has been an explosion of interest in genetics and genetic inheritance within both the research community and the mass media. The science of genetics now forecasts great advances in alleviating disease and prolonging human life, placing the family and kin group under the spotlight.

In Experiencing the New Genetics , Kaja Finkler argues that the often uncritical presentation of research on genetic inheritance as well as the attitudes of some in the biomedical establishment contribute to a "genetic essentialism," a new genetic determinism, and the medicalization of kinship in American society. She explores some of the social and cultural consequences of this phenomenon. Finkler discovers that the new genetics can turn a healthy person into a perpetual patient, complicate the redefinition of the family that has been occurring in American society for the past few decades, and lead to the abdication of responsibility for addressing the problem of unhealthy environmental conditions. Experiencing the New Genetics will assist scholars and general readers alike in making sense of this timely and multifaceted issue.

296 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2000

Reviews

[māris šteinbergs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kaja Finkler's text was about how new genetics and their discoveries change the notion of kinship, nuclear family, what social obligations are put in place once the person has some kind of genetic evidence of family or relatedness to another person. And these changes are shown through two protagonists – Teresa and Herb – and how they feel obliged to have some kind of relationship and know more about newly found relatives. This coincidence – subconscious or conscious – of newly found relatives was driven by, in some way, by the very narcissistic way, namely, they wanted to find out if they or their children could have a chance of diseases that our passed down with the persons genome.
Also, new genetics change the idea of time – there isn’t only present, now, we have the ability to look at the past and now time is not anymore just a linear way of thinking. This means, that there are possible new ways of understanding and thinking about – kinship, time, obligations, blood, and society.