The Preface begins with autobiography, explaining how a scholar of literature became interested in genetics and public policy. It describes how the author’s training in literary and cultural studies proved valuable to analyzing public attitudes toward science, a topic of importance to public policy. The book focuses on time in genetics and narrative, concentrating on three periods when literature’s perspectives on the life sciences were critical: the late-nineteenth-century reaction to Darwin; the period running from the 1920s through the Cold War, when the modern synthesis of evolution with genetics was developed in dialogue with the concept of modernity; and the twenty-first century, the age of “genome time.”

The concept of “genome time” is explored through the lens of a classic science fiction story by Samuel R. Delany, “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones.” Delany’s futuristic vision of “hologramic information storage,” which allows the interplanetary Special Services to discover and predict everything a suspect has done or will be doing at any time in the past, present, or future captures essential features of “genome time,” the illusion that data encoded in your DNA can reveal your entire life – not only where you came from but what you will become – and that it is knowable from a single test in the present. The temporal implications of genomics are compared with “queer time” and contrasted with the temporal implications of nanoscience and climate change in order to clarify what is distinctive about genome time. In conclusion, some practical consequences of genome time for public policy are discussed, focusing on privacy issues created by direct-to-consumer genetic testing.