Priscilla Wald

Future Perfect: Grammar, Genes and Geography

Genome Research from 1988 until 1992, has played a leading role in the genome mapping initiatives, and his comment, quoted in a Time magazine article about the Human Genome Project in 1989, has come for many to signify the objectionable hubris that has made the project so controversial among scientists, ethicists, and the general public. Funded by the United States Department of Energy and the NIH in October 1989, the Human Genome Project has as its goal the complete mapping and sequencing of the DNA molecule that constitutes human genetic material, which scientists hope will give them better information about the functioning?and misfunctioning?of human bodies. Genetics as a science can certainly not be reduced to the Human Genome Project, but, if coverage in fiction, movies, and the press is any indication, the project has captured the popular imagination, becoming the most visible manifestation of the possibilities and dangers of genetics. In the scientific and popular media, these initiatives have been hailed as the harbinger of medical miracles, but they are greeted equally with apprehension about their social consequences, sketched out in dystopic scenarios of the impact of genetics on human relations and dignity. Geneticists are in many ways, probably more than most scientists, near kin of literary critics, yet they are also cartographers of a sort. Texts and

Blood and stories: how genomics is rewriting race, medicine and human history

ABSTRACT In 2003 Howard University announced its intention to create a databank of the DNA of African Americans, most of whom were patients in their medical centre. Proponents of the decision invoked the routine exclusion of African Americans from research that would give them access to the most up-to-date medical technologies and treatments. They argued that this databank would rectify such exclusions. Opponents argued that such a move tacitly affirmed the biological (genetic) basis of race that had long fuelled racism as well as that the potential costs were not worth the uncertain benefits. Howard Universitys controversial decision emerges from research in genomic medicine that has added new urgency to the question of the relationship between science and racism. This relationship is the topic of Walds essay. Scientific disagreements over the relative usefulness of ‘race’ as a classification in genomic medical research have been obscured by charges of racism and political correctness. The question takes us to the assumptions of population genomics that inform the medical research, and Wald turns to the Human Genome Diversity Project, the new Genographics Project and the 2003 film Journey of Man to consider how racism typically inheres not in the intentions of researchers, but in the language, images and stories through which scientists, journalists and the public inevitably interpret information. Wald demonstrates the importance of understanding those stories as inseparable from scientific and medical research. Her central argument is that if we understand the power of the stories we can better understand the debates surrounding race and genomic medicine, which, in turn, can help us make better ethical and policy decisions and be useful in the practices of science and medicine.

Editors' Preface: Genomics in Literature, Visual Arts, and Culture

ira Levin’s 1976 thriller, The Boys from Brazil, chronicles a Nazi hunter’s discovery of a strange plot. as he struggles to make sense of a series of bizarre murders across the Western hemisphere, he presents his conundrum to audiences who have invited him to speak about his work, and he fortuitously catches the attention of a German student who is at once intrigued by the puzzle and eager to offer his aid to the protagonist’s cause. together, they discover that the notorious Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele is living in Brazil, where, having developed a process for cloning a human being, he is engaged in a scheme to create the environment that will most likely produce his fürher’s duplicate. central to this discovery is a lesson in cutting-edge science when the student’s mentor, a famous German biologist, explains the dynamics of “mononuclear reproduction,” or cloning. the reader learns with the protagonist how

Preface: Literature and Science: Cultural Forms, Conceptual Exchanges

In his Rede Lecture of 1959, the English scientist and novelist C. P. Snow coined the phrase ‘‘two cultures’’ to describe a disjunction between the sciences and the humanities that, he believed, both signaled and produced grave social problems. Four years later he explained that his primary objective in the lecture was to sharpen ‘‘the concern of rich and privileged societies for those less lucky.’’ But what amazed, angered, or amused his ever broadening audience, and subsequently became the chief legacy of the piece, was his claim that ‘‘the intellectual life of the whole western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups.’’ Humanists and scientists, he argued, have nothing in common: from their assembled data to their research methods, from the way they think to the way they talk, ‘‘a gulf of mutual incomprehension’’ divides them. They inhabit, in an anthropological sense, two cultures. The accuracy of Snow’s comments is not our concern in this special issue. We are interested more in what Jay Clayton, in his essay in this volume, calls a ‘‘convergence.’’ On the one hand, scientific specializations have moved at such a pace that the untrained are virtually illiterate. On the other hand, the practical impact of this specialized knowledge—from reproductive technologies to electronic archives, from bioterrorism to gene therapy—makes science illiteracy no longer an option. Scholars in the humanities simply have to come to terms with these forces of change. Unpersuaded by the language of crisis with which some cultural observers have responded to the current situation, we see an opportunity for creative and productive responses to the emergence of new forms of knowledge, of cross-disciplinary

Ending on a Note of Fear

On September 17, 1835, Charles Darwin recorded the Beagle’s move into St. Stephen’s harbor. Remarking on the abundance of reptilian and avian life on the island, he ends with the observation, “the birds are Strangers to Man & think him as innocent as their countrymen the huge Tortoises. Little birds, within 3 or four feet, quietly hopped about the Bushes & were not frightened by stones being thrown at them. Mr King killed one with his hat & I pushed off a branch with the end of my gun a large Hawk.”

The Other Henry James

In The Other Henry James , John Carlos Rowe offers a new vision of Henry James as a social critic whose later works can now be read as rich with homoerotic suggestiveness. Drawing from recent work in queer and feminist theory, Rowe argues that the most fruitful approach to James today is one that ignores the elitist portrait of the formalist master in favor of the writer as a vulnerable critic of his own confused and repressive historical moment. Rowe traces a particular development in James’s work, showing how in his early writings James criticized women’s rights, same-sex relations, and other social and political trends now identified with modern culture; how he ambivalently explored these aspects of modernity in his writings of the 1880s; and, later, how he increasingly identified with such modernity in his heretofore largely ignored or marginally treated fiction of the 1890s. Building on recent scholarship that has shown James to be more anxious about gender roles, more conflicted, and more marginal a figure than previously thought, Rowe argues that James—through his treatment of women, children, and gays—indicts the values and conventions of the bourgeoisie. He shows how James confronts social changes in gender roles, sexual preferences, national affiliations, and racial and ethnic identifications in such important novels as The American , The Tragic Muse , What Maisie Knew , and In the Cage , and in such neglected short fiction as “The Last of the Valerii,” “The Death of the Lion,” and “The Middle Years.” Positioning James’s work within an interpretive context that pits the social and political anxieties of his day against the imperatives of an aesthetic ideology, The Other Henry James will engage scholars, students, and teachers of American literature and culture, gay literature, and queer theory.