Discourses of Difference in Human Genomics and the HapMap Project ( 3rd Top Paper).

When James Watson suggested that Africans are less intelligent that Whites in October of this year, he was quickly called 'stupid' and 'irrational.' In this paper, I argues that this characterization misses the structural elements at play and the social, cultural, and scientific conditions in which these comments are made. Specifically, this research examines the role of cultural and scientific discourse in genomics. While scientific research is built on a position of neutrality from the object of study, it is impossible to study race without common sense understandings of racial difference 'infecting' the purity of science. Scientific discourse is embedded in cultural assumptions about the nature of race and social order. Theoretically, this paper identifies four discursive frames that characterize race talk in contemporary society, drawing on the work of Bell, Bonilla-Silva, Gilroy, Hall, and Spivak. Through a textual analysis of interviews with participants from the next Human Genome Project and articles from biomedical and science journals, I show how these frames operate in the field of human genomics. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]