CyberGenetics

This book is a powerful antidote to simplistic portrayals of online genetics as either empowering or harming test-takers. Using novel and innovative methodologies to explore how users and health professionals make sense of online genetics, it provides fascinating and also troubling insights into the meaning of online genetics at the personal, social, and political level. - Barbara Prainsack, Professor of Sociology, Department of Social Science, Health & Medicine, King’s College London

The merger of information technology and genetics into ‘cybergenetics’ is an important development in health science. This book offers crucial critical insights into revamped versions of genetic determinism, the role of online platform and companies in medical research, and questions of trust with regards to the digital technologies that increasingly organize our health care. Harris,Wyatt and Kelly provide a much needed guide to the cybergenetics future. - José van Dijck, Professor of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam

In Cybergenetics, Anna Harris, Susan Kelly and Sally Wyatt have successfully combined close reading of an impressive body of work from science and technology studies, internet studies, and the sociology of health and illness, with a deep knowledge of trends and developments in direct-to-consumer genetic testing. They offer us a critical and rigorous account of how genetic and digital worlds are remaking each other and, along the way, experiment with writing in alternative voices, from autobiologies, future scenarios, to poetry. The result is an enjoyable, thoughtful, and imaginative book, which offers an indispensable guide to non-experts, students, and researchers wishing to make sense of what happens when genetics goes online. - Dr Richard Tutton, Senior Lecturer, Lancaster University

Genetics has long remained an obscure field, carefully hidden from public consciousness. Now, in contrast, it is has become both mainstream and big business. Typically, genetic results for humans are highly personal and intensively political at the same time. Through its mixed and playful methodology and its broad theoretical framing, CyberGenetics demonstrates how the public view of genetic testing and personal genomics - as seen through social media and the Internet - revolves around several explosive axes: privacy vs. exposure, fear vs. hope, participation vs. exploitation. This book has much to offer for those interested in the exploration of identity, self and belonging through the examination of genetic avenues and informed debates about science and politics. - Gísli Pálsson, Professor Semi-Emeritus, Department of Anthropology, University of Iceland

The authors break new ground with a creative combination of internet studies, science and technology studies and sociology of health and illness, used to examine the emerging domain of online genetic testing. The result is a methodologically innovative and insightful study that brings to life the complex inter-connecting worlds of testers and tested. Dr Christine Hine, Reader in Sociology, University of Surrey