Description
The title of this book derives from C. Wright Mills’ classic The Sociological Imagination (Penguin, 1970), in which he sees the essential project of social science as the use of the imagination to 'grasp history and biography and the relations between the two in society'. This enables the social scientist to 'range from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self'. Another of Mills’ concerns was the relationship between 'the personal troubles of the milieu' and 'the public issues of social structure' and these are most acutely illustrated in human genetics, the most personal of the new technologies. The chapters in this volume address these issues through discussions of choice and informed decision-making, risks and hazards, the economic and political organization of new technology, and the public as well as the scientist’s understanding of science. The methods used range from detailed ethnographies, through deconstruction's of text and action, to surveys and interviews.
Table of Contents
Contents: Social dimensions of the Human Genome Mapping Project: an introduction; Transitional science and the Human Genome Mapping Project Resource Centre; How weak bonds stick? Genetic diagnosis between laboratory and clinic; Information technology as an instrument of genetics; Exploring organizational issues in British genomic research; Eugenics here and now; Moral and legal consequences for the fetus/unborn child of medical technologies derived from human genome research; The American gene therapy industry and the social shaping of a new technology; Social criticism and the human genome programme: some reflections on the limits of a limited social science; Signs of life - taking genetic literacy seriously.
