Genomics with Care

In <i>Genomics with Care</i> Mike Fortun presents an experimental ethnography of contemporary genomics analyzing science as a complex amalgam of cognition and affect formal logics and tacit knowledge statistics and ethics. Fortun examines genomics in terms of care-a dense composite of affective and cognitive forces that drive scientists and the relations they form with their objects of research data knowledge and community. Reading genomics with care shows how each resists definition yet is so entangled as to become indistinguishable. Fortun analyzes four patterns of genomic care-curation scrupulousness solicitude and friendship-seen in the conceptual technological social and methodological changes that transpired as the genetics of the 1980s became the genomics of the 1990s and then the post-genomics of the 2000s. By tracing the dense patterns made where care binds to science Fortun shows how these patterns mark where scientists are driven to encounter structural double binds that are impossible to resolve and yet are where scientific change and creativity occur.