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This paper addresses the impact of genetic advances and understandings on our concept of the self and the individual. In particular it focuses on conceptions of the 'autonomous individual' in the post-Enlightenment tradition and in bioethics. It considers the ascendancy of the autonomous individual as the model of the self and describes the erosion of substantial concepts of the self and the reduction of the self to "the will"--with the accompanying values of freedom, choice and autonomy. This conception of the self as an isolated, autonomous individual, characterised by acts of 'will' is then critiqued drawing on both theoretical sources, particularly the work of Iris Murdoch, and practical sources, namely the difficulties raised by genetics.

It is often suggested in the mass media and popular academic literature that scientists promote a secular and reductionist understanding of the implications of the life sciences for the concept of being human. Is adhering to this view considered to be one of the components of the notion of being a good scientist? This paper explores responses of geneticists interviewed in the UK, the USA and Russia about the cultural meanings of their work. When discussing this question the interviewees distinguished between their 'personal' and 'professional' views. When talking as 'lay people' they demonstrated a wide range of opinions none of which was perceived as incompatible with scientific practice. When talking as 'scientists' the respondents stressed that the cultural implications of their research were not a matter of their professional concern. It is suggested that these two trends in their answers could be explained by scientists tending to relegate the implications of their work to the realm of the social which they construe as divorced from scientific practice.

This paper addresses the issue of how the scientific discourse of genetics is expressed in local idioms. The examples used are taken from fieldwork conducted in Sri Lanka and relate principally to Sinhala Buddhist attempts to socialise 'big science.' The paper explores idioms of both nature and nurture in local imagery and narratives and draws attention to the rhetorical dimensions of genetic discourses when used in context. The article concludes with a preliminary attempt to identify the ways in which explanations of genetic causality are aligned with notions of karma in the explanation of illness and misfortune.

The paper presents findings from an ethnography of dysmorphology, a specialism in genetic medicine, to explore genetic counselling as a process through which parents 'become informed.' Current professional and policy debate over the use of genetic technology in medicine emphasises the need for informed choice making, and for genetic services that provide parents with what is referred to as 'non-directive genetic counselling.' In the paper the process of becoming informed is shown to be very specific and to have its own effects. Specifically, genetics is performed in dysmorphology as a space of ambiguity and uncertainty. In addition, parents are engaged by the clinic as participants in the very processes through which their child, and perhaps their family, are clinically classified. The paper examines the effects of parents' immersion in this clinical space of deferral to suggest how the need for reproductive choice, and calculation, is predicated upon clinical processes that shift parents between the experience of definition and uncertainty. The paper thus troubles simple stories about autonomous and informed choice, particularly reproductive choice, as icons of contemporary versions of what it is to be fully human.

With the rapid development of genetic research and applications in health care there is some agreement among funding and regulatory bodies that the public(s) need to be equipped to deal with the choices that the new technologies will offer them, although this does not necessarily include a role for the public in influencing their development and regulation. This paper considers the methods and purpose of public consultations in the area of genetics including large-scale surveys of opinion, consensus conferences and focus groups. Consultation has been undertaken to enable the researchers/policy makers to see what the public do not know and plan more public education to make up the deficiency, to check on areas of concern so that public education can be used to address them or to gain a public mandate for a planned policy. An alternative and more recent approach is to find out what the public(s) do know and understand and to see how experts can learn from them in order to get a fuller view of technology in use.