The intertwined genealogies of racialization and medicalization are mutating once more, with the much heralded arrival of personal genomics. A proliferation of commercial organizations now offer web-based services that, on the basis of an analysis of a DNA sample from a cheek swab and at the cost of a few hundred dollars, promise to scan millions of variations in ‘my genome’ and to tell me where my ancestors came from, to compare my genome with others, and to enable me to calculate my risk for dozens of diseases and conditions from age-related macular degeneration, through Alzheimer's disease and prostate cancer, to restless legs. These new forms of genetic information arise in part from a crisis in genomic medicine, combined with a radical reduction in the costs of gene sequencing. They are linked to a new form of thinking about the genomic bases of disease that link ancestry and medicine in new ways. These cannot be understood simply by deploying the familiar tropes of sociological and anthropological critique—by repeating that ‘race has no biological meaning’. In this article I try to characterize the new ways of thinking about individuals and populations, about risk and responsibility, and about race and population differentiation that are taking shape, and explore their personal and social implications.

This paper analyses a remarkable transformation of global capitalism in recent years: that corporations claim to be ‘good citizens’ and are driven by higher aspirations than profits alone. It focuses on the lawsuit brought by the drug company Novartis against the Indian government over the patent for the anti-cancer drug Glivec. Novartis’ attack on Indian patent law caused an international outcry. Opponents of Novartis argued that the company was trying to destroy essential provisions in the Indian law that keep drugs affordable even after the country signed up to the World Trade Organization's agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). With reference to ‘the constitutional obligation of providing good health care to its citizens’, the High Court in Chennai, India, dismissed Novartis’ challenge in August 2007. While health activists celebrated the court's decision as a victory for anti-corporate citizens, this article argues that Novartis won a more important battle elsewhere: to protect its profits in European and North American markets. The article shows how claims to ‘citizenship’ were mobilized by both anti-Novartis and pro-Novartis groups, and how Novartis’ global corporate citizenship programme succeeded even when it seemed to fail.

Drawing on previous research on geneticization and the clinical uptake of pharmacogenetics, this article argues for the use of the concept of clinical usefulness, in preference to the idea of clinical resistance to such testing. A general framework for clinical usefulness is sketched out, looking at how a number of features (clinicians’ knowledge, the differing interests of clinicians and researchers, how context influences the value of tests’ accuracy, the economic aspects of such tests and general cultural aspects of the clinic) influence how ‘useful’ a genetic or pharmacogenetic test will be seen to be by clinicians.

The autism spectrum disorders are a group of neurodevelopmental syndromes of communication, behavior and social cognition. Over the past decade, they have received increasing attention from scholars in the social sciences. This research has been motivated by the prospect of critiquing and improving support services and therapies, by self-advocates who have argued that autism should be tolerated as a form of difference rather than treated as a disorder, and by the interest inherent in syndromes that seem to affect many of the attributes that we use to define personhood. In this commentary, I review social science research on the autism spectrum. I identify some key approaches in the work, including the idea of autism as a culture, transcultural comparisons, studies based on treatment strategies, investigations of subjectivity and interpersonal relations, and research on social movements. In the process, I suggest some further directions for this area of research. I also consider some reasons why the autism spectrum disorders are a particularly interesting site for studies of the ways that biomedical information is used to craft individual and group identities.

This article explores the FBI's early efforts to develop and implement a standardized DNA profiling regime in a legal and scientific landscape shaped by strong defense challenges to the technique. Although the FBI claimed numerous times that its standardization efforts were purely ‘technical’, the FBI knew it had to create a social infrastructure that would serve to ensure the validity and reliability of the forensic DNA evidence. At the center of the system would be the FBI, serving as the obligatory, if reluctant, passage point for both technical and social exchanges. The FBI decided largely by fiat that forensic scientists based in public crime laboratories, but with little molecular biology and genetics training, bore the primary responsibility for setting standards, as well as carrying out, forensic DNA analysis. At the same time, the FBI actively excluded representatives from the private biotechnology companies that introduced the technique into the legal system, as well as the members of the defense community that were responsible for highlighting potential problems with the technique in court.