Infrastructure and Scaffolding: Interpretation and Change of Research Involving Human Genetic Information.

This essay addresses the relationship of interpretation to change, at two levels. One level concerns the revolutionary claims of molecular biology and biotechnology about using genetic information, read literally or with a minimum of interpretation, to reshape human life. The other level concerns the relationship in social studies of science and technology (STS) between interpreting projects in the life sciences and influencing their direction. On that level, the essay is experimental, employing a series of vignettes that introduce themes and questions—scaffolding—intended to stimulate readers to make their own connections between interpretation and change, in science, STS, and society. The vignettes in Part 1, which range from treatment of individuals with PKU or MAOA genes to personalized medicine and biobanks, indicate in different ways that the use of genetic information always requires social infrastructure. Once attention is given to the actual or implied social infrastructure, the prospect of reshaping life using human genetic information raises more questions than it answers. This thread carries over into Part 2, which speaks to an area of STS that needs more development, namely, conceptualizing the structure of the social context of scientific and technological developments and the nature of human agency in the ongoing restructuring of that context. The vignettes create a picture in which the influence on science of an STS interpretation will, like any effort to produce change, depend on how it links with other engagements and with the heterogeneous components that make up ongoing, intersecting processes of science in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]