Against the Genetic Grain

I first heard of Jon Beckwith in the mid-1970s, in a question framed by my genetics professor: Why would anyone willfully disrupt a research program designed to collect useful information on human genetics? The implied answer, of course, was that no rational person would; maybe some kind of a Luddite or a commie.

Jon Beckwith holds a professorship at Harvard Medical School, and did then. His area of specialization is arcane--how genes in bacteria work--and he has a list of honors to vouch for his authority in the area. But his fame in genetics has arisen more from his role as a leader in the internal critique of genetic research, highlighting its compatibility with certain invidious political agendas, and thereby occasionally informed more by cultural ideologies than by rigorous data.

My own field, biological anthropology, cut its eyeteeth providing scientific validity for the oppression of non-Nordics. Steeped in such a field, it is hard not to see the imbricate structure of science, culture and politics. But bacterial genetics is another story.

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