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Article ID: CBB001422150

The “Morbid Anatomy” of the Human Genome: Tracing the Observational and Representational Approaches of Postwar Genetics and Biomedicine The William Bynum Prize Essay (2014)

Hogan, Andrew J. (Author)

Medical History
Volume: 58, no. 3
Issue: 3
Pages: 315-336

DOI: 10.1017/mdh.2014.26

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Human genetics DNA; RNA Chromosomes Biomedicine Observation Genomics Data analysis Cytogenetics Laboratories Clinical medicine Biomedical technology 20th century

This paper explores evolving conceptions and depictions of the human genome among human and medical geneticists during the postwar period. Historians of science and medicine have shown significant interest in the use of informational approaches in postwar genetics, which treat the genome as an expansive digital data set composed of three billion DNA nucleotides. Since the 1950s, however, geneticists have largely interacted with the human genome at the microscopically visible level of chromosomes. Mindful of this, I examine the observational and representational approaches of postwar human and medical genetics. During the 1970s and 1980s, the genome increasingly came to be understood as, at once, a discrete part of the human anatomy and a standardised scientific object. This paper explores the role of influential medical geneticists in recasting the human genome as being a visible, tangible, and legible entity, which was highly relevant to traditional medical thinking and practice. I demonstrate how the human genome was established as an object amenable to laboratory and clinical research, and argue that the observational and representational approaches of postwar medical genetics reflect, more broadly, the interdisciplinary efforts underlying the development of contemporary biomedicine.

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