Reordering Life: Knowledge and Control in the Genomics Revolution by Stephen Hilgartner (review)

The formulation, stages, and early completion of the Human Genome Project constitute a familiar story for most historians of science and technology. Many scholars have examined the ethical and technical debates that shaped this history, as well as the competition between public and private entities to complete and benefit from sequencing the human genome. In Reordering Life, Stephen Hilgartner draws on fifteen years of interviews and participatory observation to offer a fresh and engaging account of the Human Genome Project, while providing a valuable and generalizable sociological analysis of this history. Hilgartner's narrative is clear, thoughtful, and precise. The inclusion of illustrated figures helps to make a highly technical story accessible to a broad audience, and his analytic terms are well defined and productive throughout.

Drawing on Karin Knorr-Cetina's groundbreaking work on the differing "epistemic cultures" of high-energy physics and molecular biology, Reordering Life explores how "big science" organization and ambitions were brought to the individualized, secretive, and highly competitive field of molecular biology during the Human Genome Project. Aligning himself with the approaches of Sheila Jasanoff, Hilgartner seeks to improve our understanding of "the coproduction of knowledge and social order" (p. 231). He accomplishes this by examining "the genomics vanguard" (p. 27) of high profile visionaries as political actors. These scientific and governmental leaders of the Human Genome Project drew on revolutionary and highly optimistic rhetoric to maintain their funding and achieve their goals. Reordering Life describes the nature, flexibility, and reconfiguration of what Hilgartner calls "knowledge-control regimes" (p. 8), which include laboratories, academic journals, private corporations, and the moral economies of scientific communities. Hilgartner convincingly demonstrates that the effects of genomics on existing knowledge-control regimes were quite subtle. Ultimately, the competitive identity of molecular biology and the nature of academic publication were left largely unchanged, even as new approaches for data distribution and accountability were adopted to facilitate collaboration.

Historians of technology will appreciate Hilgartner's account of the formulation and ongoing development of a complex socio-technical system for genomic sequencing. Reordering Life offers insightful examination of the contentious relationship between producers and users of genomic knowledge, debates about patentability and profit-potential, and the obdurate nature of existing norms and technical processes in molecular biology. Historians may be occasionally frustrated by the extent to which Hilgartner anonymizes his ethnography and interview subjects, in keeping with the ethical standards of sociological research. For instance, he recounts a 1993 conversation with "ULRIKE, a German who was part of a three-way race to find the gene that causes a specific BRAIN DISORDER" (p. 81). Because, presumably, so few scientists were working on this condition, Hilgartner was forced to provide pseudonyms not only for researcher's names, but also for their topics. Exposed to the vast and rich data set that Hilgartner amassed in his decades of highly involved research for this excellent book, historians of biomedicine and biotechnology will undoubtedly be disappointed that the specifics of these conversations, many of them held twenty-five or thirty years ago, may never be revealed for further research. This is a notable reminder of the power of knowledge-control regimes in our own disciplines.

Reordering Life is a must-read book for historians of science and technology who study the norms, conventions, and political aims of epistemic communities. Hilgartner highlights and carefully examines many thought-provoking relationships between public and private entities, scientific data and knowledge production, publication and database submission, and academic credit versus service to the scientific community. Particularly interesting is his examination of various instances of friction and resistance among actors in knowledge-control regimes. For instance, Hilgartner recounts various efforts to encourage genome researchers to make new sequence data publicly available quickly, even when this meant potentially being scooped by colleagues. Hilgartner also provides an excellent account of a path not taken: an alternative knowledge-control regime developed by the London-based Imperial Cancer Research Fund, for sharing genomic...