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>> xiii Preface On January 11, 2008, I lost my good friend Chet Meeks to colon cancer. Chet was, without a doubt, one of the smartest, most talented scholars I’ve had the good fortune to know. I learned a great deal from him over the years. Chet was just thirty-two when his cancer was first diagnosed; he died two years later. Chet did not lead an unhealthy lifestyle. He was not genetically predisposed to colon cancer. No one in his family had been diagnosed with colon cancer. The etiology of Chet’s cancer was, and will remain, a mystery , although he often wondered about the years he spent living near the Hudson River, polluted with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), when he was pursuing his PhD in sociology. Determining ultimate causes is not, understandably, high on the list of one’s concerns when diagnosed with cancer. Chet’s goal was treating the cancer and curing it despite considerably bad odds. For the cancer patient , little emotional or intellectual space exists for theorizing one’s disease in the midst of learning about the medical array of tests, treatments, and “cures.” Nevertheless, I know that Chet was, on some level, encouraged by the work I had been doing on genomics, epidemiology, and the politics of cancer, keeping conceptual and critical questions on the table, holding onto the necessity of theory in the midst of crisis—of real, in-your-face, material exigency. He was, after all, a social theorist. Although theory can be abstract, it is also an indispensable tool for making sense of the varied and often contradictory details of individual and collective embodied experience and everyday life. As Paula Treichler reminds us, “theory is not the creature disdained by . . . anti-intellectual traditions, including U.S. medicine, for whom theory is defined as that which is devoid of relevance xiv > xv medicine predicts a future of what is called personalized medicine, wherein a patient’s genome becomes the site of diagnosis and treatment of risk. On the other hand, hereditarian thinking imagines patients racially, which means that personalized medicine has the potential to become yet another privilege of white patients, for whom race does not enter into diagnosis and treatment practices. Despite the paradox whereby genomics simultaneously reifies both individuals and populations, its immanent hereditarianism nevertheless effects a crucial displacement in both cases: disease is evidence of inherited defects, not embodied life. Genomics is, then, more than a disease paradigm —it is a political worldview that has been both a constant in US history and a particular way of performing ideological work during discrete moments in that history. Indeed, my interest in genomics began long ago with the question, what makes the genomic model of disease distinct from other models? The answer to that question emerged largely through a particular reading of eugenics. During a regrettable period of history in which a vicious racism and nativism intersected, however tangentially, with the newly discovered theory of heredity, eugenics justified—in the minds of reactionaries and progressives alike—the figurative and literal criminalization of blacks, women, immigrants, and poor people. Why, I ask in this book, has heredity remained uniquely suited to the task of constructing biopolitical discourse during crucial and sometimes painful phases of industrial capitalism and emerging social movements and discourses of resistance? To understand why it matters that Chet was stricken with an aggressive cancer at such a young age, we must think beyond his individual body and the treatments it required. We must think of his experience through the framework of collectivity: of his body located in space and time with others, living in environments and social relations not of their own making but resulting from deeply politicized and self-interested corporate, governmental, and institutional practices. To answer the questions I pose requires the humanist’s eye, located a safe and critical distance from the disciplinary norms of genomics, medicine, and public health. In the spirit of scholarly inquiry, and in memory of Chet’s unrivaled intellect and sense of humor, I present the following study. This page intentionally left blank ...

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