Keller, Evelyn Fox. "Nature, Nurture, and the Human Genome Project," in Daniel J. Kevles and Leroy Hood, eds. The Code of Codes: Scientific and Social Issues in the Human Genome Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. pp. 281-299.

Evelyn Fox Keller’s essay investigates the biological determinism that is at the root of the Human Genome Project (HGP) and the tensions that exist between concerns about an over-determining use of biology and insecurities about not moving "forward" scientifically. Though most of the scientific community, including those working on the HGP acknowledge the roles of both nature and nurture, increasingly nature is coming to be regarded as the more decisive factor. In order to shed light on this shift, Keller examines the cultural history of genetics.

In the early part of the century from the ‘teens to the forties genetics and heredity were regarded as the pre-eminent factors guiding human development, as expressed in eugenic "cleansing" ideologies. Following the horrors of the Holocaust, however, "biological explanations of non-physical human differences rapidly lost favour in the general revulsion toward the uses to which they had been put by the Nazis" (285). The link between genetics and eugenics was severed by a more general demarcation between biology and culture—hence the shift in the 1950s and 1960s to psychological and behavioural approaches.

Unfortunately by 1968 the scientific community had begun to talk about genetic factors of non-physiological and social aspects of human life again. What the current project to map the human genome represents, then, is a convergence of cultural attitudes and technology. Disease is coming increasingly to be thought only in terms of genetic factors, so much so that "genetic disease" is becoming an incredibly vast category which now encompasses conditions such as alcoholism and even homelessness. This ideological turn serves to overshadow external social factors such as poverty, overwork or environmental degradation.

Despite its limited therapeutic uses, there is a growing tendency to rely on genetic information as the only means to a cure. In a shift from earlier bio-determinism, however, the emphasis is less on physical or cultural perfection than on an individual and "natural" right to health. In this one finds a moral distinction being made between the nasty strains of eugenics from the days of yore, and contemporary "eugenics of normalcy" which argues that "individuals have a paramount right to be born with a normal, adequate hereditary endowment" (295).

Entwined with this new eugenic philosophy is a rampant individualism in which "the current concern is the problem . . . of the ‘disease causing genes’ that "some of us as individuals have inherited’. . . . Accordingly it is presented in terms of the choices that ‘they as individuals’ will have to make" (295, emphasis in the original). Furthermore, there is a trend in the HGP to move back into a genetics that delineates less clearly between biology and culture, as "‘culture’ has become subsumed under biology" (297). The danger, then, is not of some new fascist regime, but our own ridiculous trust in the "right hands" of scientists and their ability to arbitrate what constitutes normality.

See also Cooper, The Human Genome Project: Deciphering the Blueprint of Heredity and Miringoff, The Social Costs of GeneticWelfare.