Since late last year, I’ve been listening to a CBC radio show called Ideas. I started with the Massey Lectures of Alberto Manguel (buy it!), which were very, very good. Over the past few months, Ideas has been broad/podcasting a weekly series called How to Think About Science”, hosted by David Cayley. So far, Cayley has interviewed historians, sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, and STS luminaries like Ulrich Beck, Evelyn Fox Keller, Bruno Latour, and Simon Schaffer.

The most recent podcast profiles German historians Barbara Duden and Silja Samerski, who talk about the cultural meanings of genes.

For Duden, the cultural power of the ‘gene’ has to do with its association with heredity and risk.

Duden says, “We spoke with the woman who sells sausages, because she was explaining over the counter to the client: she said, “Oh! The chromosomes were as long as this!” and she demonstrated with her fingers the lengths of the chromosomes. She had genetic counseling, and we were interested in what was left with her. And what we found out is first, genes stand in for how you are in your very flesh. Because, you are the daughter of this mother and grandmother, and so on. So she would say, “I can see [in mychildren] this is the genes of their father, how they sit there, they sit like him, or one daughter is unruly. He also in his childhood was unruly! This is his genes. So it was a synonym for saying, this is how she is.”

On the ‘risky’ character of genes, Duden talks about a women who describes the gene as a ‘capsule’ which will unpredictably open and release the danger inside.

One of Duden’s main points is that, within the semantic scaffolding of heredity and risk, there is a tremendous ‘lack of definition’ that gives the idea of the ‘gene’ its power.

As we look more closely at deCODEme and the communities that have appeared around it, I’ll be interested in seeing how this lack of definition provides opportunities for different people to forge meanings for themselves out of ‘genetic’ scaffolding, and what resources are available to them as they do this.

(There are signs of this in the nascent (still-born?) “R1b1c Pride” movement happening at the above community, but more on this later…)