[In process.]

Abstract

The story, which unfolds here, is a cultural history of science, one that closely analyzes the content of science. My story deals with an object, a gene. I use the CCR5 gene as a heuristic tool in order to probe the boundaries between science and society. Three important themes are discussed in this essay: genes as commodities (intellectual property and gene patents); alleles, natural selection, and the resistance to disease; and race and genomics. This is in part a story about neoliberalism, laissez-faire goverenments, free and open markets, the increase of privatization, and biotechnology. Many claim that the United States Patent and Trademake Office's (henceforth, USPTO) leniency in granting gene patenting led to the growth of biotechnology. I maintain the opposite: the growth of biotechnology led to decision to patent genes. My story is one of the present, a genealogy to borrow FOUCAULT'S and NIETZsCHE's terminology. How has it come about that genes are patentable entities, and that human classificatory schemes are usually based on race, although there are an infinite number of possibilities to characterize human variation? There are always alternatives, and historians are obliged to present those alternatives and explain why they were never chosen. I also use the concept of genealogy in the classical biological sense, i.e. to trace the passing of alleles from one generation to another. While this essay is similar to earlier studies dealing with the biography of objects, particularly scientific objects, the history told here is not a biography of the CCR5 gene, as that story is still ongoing. Rather, this essay concentrates upon a twenty-year period of the gene's life from the mid-1990s to the present. I am interested in understanding how it is we have reached the point we have today with respect to the relationship between science and society, and I use the CCR5 gene as a vehicle for that analysis.