The Human Genome Diversity Project
An Ethnography of Scientific Practice

This book is based on an ethnography of laboratory practice and explores issues around standardization, naturalisation and diversity.

Amade M'Charek (Author)

9780521832229, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 January 2005

224 pages
23.6 x 15.8 x 2.3 cm, 0.476 kg

'M'Charek offers the reader a fascinating first-hand account of science-in-practice at two of the laboratories involved in the Human Genome Diversity Project, but this is more than just another instalment in the now well-established tradition of ethnography in/of the laboratory. … engagingly written …'. Environment and Planning A

The Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) was launched in 1991 by a group of population geneticists whose aim was to map genetic diversity in hundreds of human populations by tracing the similarities and differences between them. It quickly became controversial and was accused of racism and 'bad science' because of the special interest paid to sampling cell material from isolated and indigenous populations. The author spent a year carrying out participant observation in two of the laboratories involved and provides fascinating insights into daily routines and technologies used in those laboratories and also into issues of normativity, standardization and naturalisation. Drawing on debates and theoretical perspectives from across the social sciences, M'charek explores the relationship between the tools used to produce knowledge and the knowledge thus produced in a way that illuminates the HGDP but also contributes to our broader understanding of the contemporary life sciences and their social implications.

Introduction: The Human Genome Diversity Project
1. Technologies of populations: making differences and similarities between Turkish and Dutch males
3. Ten chimps in a laboratory: or how a human genetic marker may become a good genetic marker for typing chimps
4. Naturalisation of a reference sequence: Anderson or the Mitochondrial Eve of modern genetics
5. The traffic in males and other stories on the enactment of the sexes in studies of genetic lineage
6. Technologies of similarity and difference or how to do politics with DNA.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC], Social issues & processes [JFF]