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WRITING BIODIGITAL LIFE: PERSONAL GENOMES AND DIGITAL MEDIA

KATE ORIORDAN

There has been a boom in writing by scientists, journalists, and media gures that takes up human genomes as a technology of life story. Research projects that generate personal human genome sequences and the emergence of direct-to-consumer genome scanning services together have generated these tales from the genome. One example is Harvard psychologist Steven Pinkers New York Times article My Genome, My Self, which narrates his experience of whole genome sequencing with the Personal Genome Project: Last fall I submitted to the latest high-tech way to bare your soul. I had my genome sequenced and am allowing it to be posted on the Internet, along with my medical history. Another protagonist in this project is Misha Angrist, who has just published his autobiographical account Here is a Human Being at the Dawn of Personal Genomics. Angrist also casts himself as an explorer looking into the future at the dawn of a new era. The executive editor of Wired magazine, Thomas Goetz, wrote his autobiographical account of genome scanning with the California company 23andMe. Subtitled Welcome to the Age of Genomics, Goetz also sees himself as looking into the future of medicine. UK journalist Nic Flemings account of his experience with multiple scanning services, in contrast, casts himself as a detective investigating these companies. Human genome sequences are generated through highly abstract computational processes, which can then translate into accessible dimensions of life story. Genome information is viewed through browsers and circulated as Internet text in the coming together of human sequence information and digital media cultures. It has become a technology of stories about genetics, health, and behavior, but also about being part of a cutting-edge elite, looking into the future, exploring new domains, and investigating the claims of genomics. In the 1990s, the global big science Human Genome Project produced a single human genome sequence. The project took thirteen years to complete,
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and involved thousands of people. The completion of the draft in 2000 was announced through a joint USA-UK press conference in which the genome was framed as the book of life and Gods language (Nerlich, Dingwall, and Clarke). This singular project was framed as a marvelous spectacle that promised to tell the story of human life. One way in which this promise has been delivered is through the development of testing for genetic conditions, which has provided individuals with forms of diagnosis and with health-related dimensions of biography. In the ten years since the completion of the Human Genome Project draft, the direction of genomic research has shifted towards the generation and analysis of multiple genomes. This orientation has generated an almost explosive proliferation of genome sequencing and scanning. Accompanying these sequences are the biographies and autobiographies of the people to whom they are attached. Currently these attachments are to celebrityscientists, journalists, and other media gures, and genomic life stories can be characterized as the preserve of an elite and largely male authorship. There are strong connections between the dynamics of these contemporary genomic life stories and those examined in Maureen McNeils work on the heroes and autobiographies of genomic science, particularly in regards to their gender dynamics. Like James Watsons famous biography The Double Helix, contemporary stories present techno-scientists as ordinary guys who are accessing incredible new knowledge forms. While there are prominent interventions in genetic life writing by womenfor example, Masha Gessons Blood Matters and Alice Wexlers Mapping Fatethese accounts are of women who have turned to genetic testing in a quest for self knowledge. The celebrity genomic biographies and autobiographies under examination in this article are interested rst and foremost in genomic knowledge production. These works provide a promotional culture for genome sequencing and scanning services by highlighting them in the press and in popular science writing. By offering a point of identication with the protagonist, this publicity constructs genomes as an elite luxury, while at the same time promising an imminent mass market. Although the human genome was framed as the book of life, and sequencing is framed as a matter of life and death (ORiordan), genomic life stories are actually closer to a matter of life style. At one and the same time, the form of these genomic life stories is highly mediatized and very intimate. The stories appear in both general newspapers and the technology press, and are as associated with blogs, columns, book deals, and TV programs as with genomic research. Genomic life stories are supplemented by the public circulation of genome sequences, scans, or test information, which become the object for producing the story. For example, an online open access repository called Promethease provides a publicly available

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form of comparative analysis. In what has become a convention, sequences generated by suppliers such as the Personal Genome Project, 23andMe, and DeCodeMe are voluntarily deposited at this site for public circulation. To date, Promethease houses fty-ve human genomes. In this article, I sketch out the general terrain of biodigital life writing, while focusing on some individual stories. I outline the shift and proliferation from singular genome to multiple genomes over the last decade, and highlight the contradictory features of intimate publicity at this interface between personal genomes and digital media.
SHIFT AND PROLIFERATION

Caroline Bassett argues that digital communication technologies created an explosion in narrative in the 1990s. Through the take up of Internet technologies, storytelling has proliferated, and personal home pages and blogs extend beyond the measurable. As Marie-Laure Ryan puts it, avatars of story populate virtual worlds. Digital storytelling practices abound through the circulation of video, photos, animations, and slide shows. In this milieu, individual genome sequences have created an expansion in genomic forms of biography, and have added to a culture of expectation about the capacity of genomics to story not just life itself (Franklin 188), but individual lives. Personal genomics signals a comparably expansive moment in which genomes proliferate, and with them life stories. At the start of the twenty-rst century, there was one human genome and it took thirteen years to sequence. Ten years on, it takes three weeks to sequence a genome, and although the number of complete human genome sequences is only in the hundreds, the number of personal or direct-to-consumer (DTC) genome scanning services is growing. These services can also be thought of as narrative machines. They present sequence information in relation to narratives about health, behavior, and ancestry. In 2009 one of those companies, 23andMe, announced that it had scanned 30,000 genomes. Though primarily conned to a technocratic elite, the production of genomes is exponential, and with these scans come genomic life stories created through the take up of these informational stories by those implicated in them. Celebrities have led the way in producing these highly visible genomic biographies. Genomes dont just produce any kind of story however. As signs of life, they add biological dimensions to life stories biographies and autobiographiesof both those who produce the sequences and those from whom sequences are extracted. These biological dimensions bring with them emotional attachments that can shock, as well as resource, a sense of self. However, the dominant characteristic of these genomic life stories is not the biological shocks to the sense of self but the capacities of

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genomics to cast the protagonists as explorers of a new era. Reections on the vulnerability of lives, and dilemmas about which information to get back, are captured in these stories. Steven Pinker decides, for example, to refuse the information about whether he has a gene that increases the chance of Alzheimers. The capacity of the writer to adjudicate on the value and interpretation of genomic knowledge thus takes center stage in these tales. In tandem with this proliferating circulation of genomes, the storytelling capacity of genomics in general has shifted, from the scale of the universal to the personal. In the 1990s, the Human Genome Project was a story about a universal genome composed of genes and behaviors or conditions, manifested in gene discovery stories. By the end of this project, the mapping of the genome was framed in universal terms as the code or book of lifeas Gods language (Franklin, Nerlich et al., Roof). This universal and singular human genome, although drawn from multiple individuals, produced a rather abstract story as the reference sequence for all of humanity. Although singular and dramatic, the human genome story had too much meaning to make much sense. It produced stories about genes, about sequencing technology, and about the processes of science. It was also a drama about scientists and nations. Genome mapping was cast as a race between the public service-oriented British scientist embodied by Sir John Sulston, and corporate US science, embodied by Craig Venter (McNeil). These dramas populated the genomic imaginary during the 1990s and early twenty-rst century. But once this map was announced as complete, this also nished the story of the singular universal genome. The story of the genome map moved into a new erawhat Jenny Reardon calls the post-genomic condition, in which some of the overarching questions are about genomic sense-making, protability, and governance. Genomic life stories are part of this genomic sense-making, as they interpellate intimate publics in this project. There is a collapse between the production and consumption of genomic life stories, via the intimacy of the body, because leading gures in the production of these genomes also self-produce their own genomes. Through their engagement in the form, those from whom genomes might be said to be extracted also become the author of their own genomic biographies. So, for example, George Church, founder of the Personal Genome Project, a very high-end research-oriented full-sequencing service, used his own genome as part of the project. Craig Venter, a leading gure in the mapping of the human genome, and one of Time Magazines Time 100 list of the most inuential gures in the world in 2007, published his genome sequence in the same yearalong with his autobiography A Life De-Coded: My Genome, My Life. Following Venter, James Watson, one of the people who contributed to the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA in the 1950s, and a leading gure in the Human Genome Project, became the

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second person in the world to publish his genome sequence online in 2007. Watson had already provided a much earlier innovation in genetic autobiography, in 1968, by publishing the crossover popular science-personal memoir The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA.1 Leading gures in the genome sciences, and signicant investors in genome sequencing, now publish genomic biographies together with their own genomes online. This doubling of biography through memoir and genetic sequence has become a dening feature of this area. Steven Pinkers My Genome, My Self demonstrates the celebrity-scientist end of this spectrum of stories. As we shall see, Pinkers narrative also demonstrates why it is difcult to take this kind of biodigital life writing on its own terms, and points to some contradictions and trouble ahead in the take up of these forms.
LIFE STORIES

Genetics is ineluctably representative of life itself. However, in the move from the universal to the personal, and from the singular to the multiple, genomics has been taken up as a life-style technology of individual biography and autobiography. The high-end global celebrity scientist stories of Craig Venter, Stephen Pinker, James Watson, and George Church have their correlates in journalism, and in the broad media dissemination of tales of celebrities who have had DTC genome scans and published their stories as part of their media celebrity performance (ORiordan). In the UK, these autobiographical tales from media and journalism include Virginia Ironside, John OConnell, and Nic Fleming. In each case, the journalist had tests or genome scans, and gave an autobiographical account of the process, the results, and the overall experience. In 2007, the UKs The Killer in Me also televised four media gures in the process of having genetic scans, reporting on the dilemmas, results, and reactions. The program followed former GMTV presenter Fiona Phillips, former England footballer John Barnes, then Heart FM disc jockey Toby Anstis, and former newspaper editor and presenter Andrew Neil as they undertake a one stop DNA test to nd out which common killers could be hidden within their genes (Killer). The eponymous killer referred to the possibility that a life-threatening disease might be revealed lurking in the genome of one of the participants. The dramatic framing attaches me to the genome, creating a biographical presentation of the lives of the four media gures. It also introduced genetic testing as an everyday technology of both life history and future story in the UK. While leading gures in biotech worlds circulate their own sequences, those from who genomes are extracted also become the authors of their own genomic biographies. This practice incorporates leading gures from other

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domains into genomics. Thus Steven Pinker, a prominent psychologist, was included in the rst round of George Churchs Personal Genome Project. After Pinkers genome sequence was produced, he wrote an extended autobiographical article for the New York Times, My Genome, My Self, echoing Venters title My Genome, My Life. In this piece, Pinker invoked the genome sequence as a biographical technology: Last fall I submitted to the latest high-tech way to bare your soul. Drawing on his own expertise in psychology, he told a story about genomics with some forays into the information that his sequence threw up:
The two biggest pieces of news I got about my disease risks were a 12.6 percent chance of getting prostate cancer before I turn 80 compared with the average risk for white men of 17.8 percent, and a 26.8 percent chance of getting Type 2 diabetes compared with the average risk of 21.9 percent.

In relation to the region of the genome that indicates a likeliness of Alzheimers, Pinker reported that his current burden of existential dread is just about right, and vetoed this information. He discovered that he carried a gene that could have dehabilitating effects on future children, but he reported that this wasnt relevant to his path in life. In relation to ancestry, Pinker was much more enthusiastic:
Its thrilling to nd yourself so tangibly connected to two millenniums of history. And even this secular, ecumenical Jew experienced a primitive tribal stirring in learning of a deep genealogy that coincides with the handing down of traditions I grew up with.

This move into an affective register is rare, however, and although the article goes through his own probability for disease, ancestry, and behavior, the story provides more of a model as to how to deal with genomic information through Pinkers example. Pinker provides a rich discussion of different kinds of genomics and the limitations of genomic information. He returns to psychology throughout as a way of knowing, and also points to other interpretative frames and factors, including family history, complexity, concepts of will and individualism, and determinism. His story is an account of himself as an expert, placing him as the ideal genome reader, and inviting other readers who are bitten by scientic or personal curiosity and can think in probabilities to enjoy the fruits of personal genomics. This strategy could be thought about in terms of a trading zone between psychology and genomics (Galison), where expertise is traded between two powerful scientic subcultures to produce the power to story life in the contemporary world. In his autobiographical article, Pinker develops the tropes

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of democratization, already present in the Personal Genome Projects aims, by explaining that personal genome sequencing takes access to DNA away from the hands of the white coated priesthood and gives it to anyone who can afford the price of a at screen TV. He also reiterates the metaphors of the code of life, likening genome sequencing to the internet:
Like the early days of the Internet, the dawn of personal genomics promises benets and pitfalls that no one can foresee. . . . With the genome no less than with the Internet, information wants to be free, and I doubt that paternalistic measures can stie the industry for long.

On the one hand, Pinker uses his genome sequence as a technology for autobiography: the title of the article frames self as genome and vice versa. On the other hand, he does not conate self with his genome in the detail of the argument, and in fact actively resists this conation. He tells his readers that some of the information from his genome sequence is helpful in the know thyself project, but he cautions against using genome sequencing too fully as a form of self knowledge, noting that Its still a messy science, with plenty of false alarms, contradictory results and tiny effects. He suggests that a skeptical and widely resourced reader of genome sequences is one sufciently qualied to enjoy the fruits of personal genomics by contextualizing it. Pinker shows how several of his own resources, including psychology, seventeenth century French literature, and statistics, construct this ideal informed subject of genomic autobiography. This use of genomics as the technology of story characterizes these tales, while at the same time the reader is cautioned against genomic reductionism or essentialism. This move could be thought of in terms of the production of genomic cultural capital, where the expertise needed to be a genome reader is constructed and dened by those who tell these stories. The move from the universal human genome to individual genomes via a technocultural elite has three dimensions. It simultaneously produces more genomic data, promises to make this genomic data more meaningful, and creates new markets for genomics. This move opens up a consumer interface with human genomics, and invites people into the process of telling intimate stories from the genome. However, even while extending this invitation, genomic life stories remain a highly elite form. About the time Pinker referred to the cost of a at-screen TV, the service with which he engaged sold its sequencing commercially for approximately 63,000. This would buy a very high-end at screen television indeed. Other genome scanning services provide a much more limited version of the sequence information for around 300 (23andMe ). Given that these latter services are pregured as lacking medical relevance, this becomes a life-style expenditure on interesting

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information, rather than a medical health cost, and as such 300 might be a lot to throw around. There are two difculties in understanding Pinkers story on its own terms. First, the oscillation between genomic determinism on the one hand and the imperative to represent genomic information as contingent and complex on the other creates problems for the intelligibility of genomics. Second, the reconstruction of an elite identity for the genomic author provides an internal contradiction to that of the promise to take genomics out of the hands of a priesthood, because Pinkers own position and his autobiographical voice re-instantiates precisely this kind of clerical elite. While such modes of translation may be very valuable, the rhetorical use of openness and democracy in relation to genomic information appears to cover over the construction of an elite class of genome readers. At the same time, this story constitutes the promotion of a product, which although fun and interesting, has little in the way of value and rather a lot in the way of problems. It is contradictory to be in the business of offering consumers genomic dimensions to their identity while modelling a cautionary tale that only those in the know are in a position to interpret this information. Although Pinker comes close to making these contradictions visible, the casting of genomics as a candidate for the real answer casts a rather overwhelming shadow of genomic enthusiasm over the careful deconstruction scholars of autobiography and memoir have long recognized: None of us know what made us what we are, and when we have to say something, we make up a good story. . . . An obvious candidate for the real answer is that we are shaped by our genes in ways that none of us can directly know.
MORE TALES FROM THE GENOME

In a 2001 interview with Maggie Fox, Health and Science editor for Reuters, Eric Lander, one of the rst authors on the Human Genome Map, declared, I dont know if people realize that we just found the worlds greatest history book. We are going to be up every night reading tales from the genome. Its so cool. The framing of the genome as a book, text, or code has been a dominant characteristic of gene talk (Roof, Nelkin and Lindee). However, its capacity to be a technology of story has previously been limited by the available protagonists about whom tales could be told. In theory, on the basis that the genome mapped a universal humanity, tales from the genome could be about anyone and everyone. However, it quickly became apparent that only specic identities, such as populations and patients, could be incorporated in the tales from the singular human genome. For example, newly discovered genetic conditions like Ataxia, and thus new patient identities and patient groups,

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were among the subjects that emerged from the genome in the 1990s. The discovery of single gene disorders and the medical testing regimes attached to them are, I would suggest, of a different order of knowledge production to these new commercial interfaces with genomics. The Human Genetic Diversity Project, the Human Haplotype Map, and the 1,000 Genomes projects are all attempts, along with personal genomics, to get more specic about who the tales from the genome are about and to expand the we who are the reading public for genomics. Personal genomics, by putting the person into the genome while publishing genomes, creates a new eld of biographical and autobiographical tales from the genome. The bodily samples and tissues required to render genomes personal are part of the intimacy of this expansion of publics. Cheek cells from saliva and blood are two of the preferred genome sources. The intimate insertion of individual bodies and personal specicity can be read off the titles of services in this area. 23andMe provides consumers genome scans derived from saliva, while trying to leverage the information gathered as useful for biomedical research. Its title puts the twenty-three human chromosomes together with methe protagonist of the genome sequence it delivers. DeCodeMe works on the same linguistic basis, and with the same cells. Arising from DeCode Genetics, a company based on the privatization of the Icelandic Health service database (Rose), it added an international personal genome scanning service, and added me to its play on people as decodable subjects. Knome, the private company attached to George Churchs Personal Genome Project, through which Stephen Pinkers genome was scanned, is pronounced know meand they require blood. The Personal Genome Project also puts the singular person in the genome. Multiple services and research ventures now operate in this same mode of address, where possessive and personal pronouns are coupled with genomes derived from tissue samples. This address is both produced and taken up by the celebrity scientists who are involved in developing the sequencing technologies and in generating genomic meaning in the sciences, including George Church, Craig Venter, and James Watson. At the same time, it is also taken up by journalists and other media gures in both general interest areas and in special technology or health sections. Wired s Thomas Goetz, for example, used the 23andMe genome scanning service, and wrote an article about the experience in his own magazine. He also published a non-ction science technology and health book, The Decision Tree: Taking Control of Your Health in the New Era of Personalized Medicine. Goetzs Wired article, 23andMe Will Decode Your DNA for $1,000. Welcome to the Age of Genomics, explores a variety of issues about genomic research, reviews the state of the eld, and discusses the key players in the USA. It

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also contexualizes genomics in terms of personalized medicine more generally. The article is topped and tailed by stories about Goetzs own medical health, family information, and the results of his 23andMe genome scan. He opens the piece with a story about three generations: his grandfather, his father, and himself. At the age of 65, he begins, my grandfather, the manager of a leather tannery in Fond Du Lac, Wisconsin, suffered a severe heart attack. The last section of the article relates the family heart attack story back to Goetzs genome scan:
My risk for heart disease may be lower than average, but that doesnt mean my genome isnt primed for problems. Far from it. Variations of three SNPs double my risk for prostate cancer, leaving me with a 30 percent chance of developing it in my lifetime.

Goetzs semi-autobiographical article welcomes readers to the age of genomics, and demonstrates the features of recursivity, biodigitality, and elitism that characterize the form. Goetz also touches on vulnerability and mortalityhe is reassured that his genome seems to be telling him that he is not as likely to have problems with heart disease as his grandfather and father before him. Goetz describes the experience of genome scanning as simultaneously unsettling, illuminating, and empowering. His story also demonstrates the doubling of publicity that occurs in the personal-public address of genomics as both promoting, in a commercial sense, and extending out to a civic public, in a political sense. Contained within this piece are similar contradictions to those found in Pinkers story. All life writing is recursive in the sense that it refers back to and draws upon the life that it narrates. Genomic life stories are endlessly recursive tales that loop through a series of tellings about my genome, myself, my life, and my genomic life writing. At the same time that Goetz and other elite storytellers distance themselves from the collapse of life into genome, they deploy genome scans as a life storying technology, reiterating a kind of genetic derminism. For example, Goetz nishes his article with the knowing disavowal of the collapse of genomics into life. A genome scan is one more factor revealed, an instrument suddenly within reach that can help us examine, and perhaps improve, our lives. At the same time that Goetz moves away from completely centering genomics, taken as a whole, his story recursively draws back on 23andMe and genomics as the determining agents. We have already been told that they will decode our DNA, and we are welcomed into the age of genomics by Goetzs genomic life story. At the same time, his disavowal of genomics as collapsible to life exhibits his own qualications to make meaning from genomic information.

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Goetz draws on the trope of empowerment that dominates the personal genomics eld, and looks to the consumer interface to provide access: The advent of retail genomics will make a once-rare experience commonplace. Shopping, the reader is told, will make elite technologies common. This appeal to democratization via commerce draws on concepts of purchasing power, free markets, and trickle-down models of distribution, part of a commonsense assumption that consumption is almost the same as biocitizenshipan assumption Pinker echoes in his comparison between the cost of at screen televisions and genome sequences. Like Pinker, however, Goetz is part of a technocultural elite, and this also denes his life story. Anyone may be the subject of personal genomics, but this is qualied by the addition of a $1,000 price tag and a reference to early adopters. Goetz simultaneously opens the specter of the mass market through the reference to anyone, and closes it down by publishing the story in Wired, by referencing the cost of the scan, and by interpellating the reader into the early adopter subject position of technocultures. The construction of this position, in the shadow of impending mass market technology, sets Goetz up as another kind of priestly gure, prophesying a future for his readers. In constructing genomic empowerment, Goetz points to the same key factors of statistics and probability as Pinker. They both deal with the puzzle of empowerment versus determination by drawing on genomic information as part of a process of assessing odds, risks, and probable chances. Pinker tells us that in some rare cases genetic determinism is right; the gene for Huntingtons causes Huntingtons disease. However, in almost all other cases, for both Pinker and Goetz, complexity and probability characterize genomics, under whose advent we have stumbled into a far more arduous calculus, one requiring a full arsenal of algorithms and vectors. Its a more powerful tool but its also a lot more complicated.
DECONSTRUCTING BIODIGITAL LIFE WRITING

While genomes are a technology of story, they are not by themselves stories. Genome sequences or scans have to be narrated through annotation, commentary, interpretation, and explanation, in relation to the life of the protagonist. In this sense, they might be thought of as paradigmatic to the syntagm of biography; that is, they make up the elements that produce the story, but they are not storytellers. To borrow further from Caroline Bassett, they could be said to be part of a narrative arc that ows from the bodies of people being sequenced and back again. It is these narratives, rather than the sequence information, that provide the tales from the genome. In the sense that they narrate the self, they are recursive or autobiographical, but they are

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also replaceable. Biomedical signs are always productive of biography, but the kinds of signs that can be used to write this life change over time. Blood, genes, and genomes have historically gured as the sign of life (Roof 171). Currently bioinformatic genomes, with their constituent DNA and genes and digital form, are ascendant as the new material for biography-making. This biodigital life writing, in the form of accounts of interactions with digital genome scans, cuts across multiple media forms. My contextual analysis here of fragments of these accounts focuses on some of their contradictions. The centrality of me as the protagonist in current tales from the genome signals a kind of publicly intimate consumer interface for genomics, demanding the circulation of autobiography in the milieu of digital media. This interface is one at which a critical engagement with human genomics might proceed. As the constitution of intimate digital publics supplements the unfocused marvel of the double helix with an interactive focus on the genome and me, the contradictions in genomic narratives ironically become more apparent. To date, these stories are authored by gures who promise to democratize genomics. At the same time they display their own elite qualications to make meaning from genomes. However, the progression of an expanded reading public for genomics may be impeded by the contradictions already signaled. If genomics is only one more tool in an array of ways of knowing about human lives, why should people be persuaded by its expository powers, and spend time and money on the production of more and more genomes? Equally, if genomics is complex and needs to be carefully contextualized with specialist knowledge, why should the promise of democratization have appeal? The contradictions of these biodigital life writings could pose problems for the creation of a mass market in sequencing and genomic life storying because they evoke such opposing expectations. This might be more liberating in the end than for genomics to become the story of our lives.
NOTES

1. For further analysis, see McNeil.

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Fox, Maggie. First Look at Human Genome Shows How Little There Is. Reuters.com. Reuters Group, 1 Feb. 2001. Web. 15 Apr. 2011. Franklin, Sarah. Life Itself: Global Nature and the Genetic Imaginary. Global Nature, Global Culture. Ed. Sarah Franklin, Celia Lury, and Jackie Stacey. London: Sage, 2000. 188227. Print. Galison, Peter. Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997. Print. Gesson, Masha. Blood Matters: From Inherited Illness to Designer Babies. How the World and I Found Ourselves in the Future of the Gene. New York: Mariner Books, 2009. Print. Goetz, Thomas. The Decision Tree: Taking Control of Your Health in the New Era of Personalized Medicine. New York: Rodale, 2010. . 23andMe Will Decode Your DNA for $1,000. Welcome to the Age of Genomics. Wired Magazine 15.12 (11.17.07): n. pag. Web. 18 Apr. 2011. Ironside, Virginia. DIY Genetic test: I want to know the worst. The Independent 6 Nov. 2007. Web. 15 Apr. 2011. The Killer in Me. ITV.com. ITV plc., n.d. Web. 18 Apr. 2011. McNeil, Maureen. Feminist Cultural Studies of Science and Technology. Reading: Routledge, 2007. Print. Nelkin, Dorothy, and Susan Lindee. The DNA Mystique: The Gene as Cultural Icon. New York: W. H. Freeman, 1996. Print. Nerlich, Brigitte, Robert Dingwall, and David Clarke. The Book of Life: How the completion of the Human Genome Project was revealed to the public. Health 6.4 (2002): 44569. Print. OConnell, John. Playing doctors and nurses. The Observer. Guardian News and Media Ltd., 25 Nov. 2007. Web. 19 Apr. 2011. ORiordan, Kate. The Genome Incorporated. Reading: Routledge, 2010. Pinker, Steven. My Genome, My Self. New York Times Magazine 7 Jan. 2009: MM24. Print. Reardon, Jenny. The Postgenomic Condition: Technoscience at the Limits of Liberal Democratic Imaginaries. Klopsteg Seminar Series in Science in Human Culture. Northwestern U, 8 Feb. 2010. Lecture. Roof, Judith. The Poetics of DNA. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. Print. Rose, Hillary. The Commodication of Bioinformation: The Icelandic Health Sector Database. London: Wellcome Trust, 2001. Print. Ryan, Marie-Laure. Avatars of Story. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2006. Print. 23andMe. 23andMe, Inc., n.d. Web. 18 Apr. 2011. Venter, Craig. A Life De-Coded: My Genome, My Life. London: Viking, 2007. Print. Watson, James. The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA. 1968. New York: Touchstone, 2001. Print. Wexler, Alice. Mapping Fate: A Memoir of Family, Risk, and Genetic Research. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996.