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Structuring Race into the Machine: The Spoiled Promise of Postgenomic Sequencing Technologies

Biopolitics

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Abstract

Genetics has been a fruitful area of study for anthropologists of technology since the late twentieth century. In all its wide range of applications—from reproduction to forensics —genetic technologies raise questions of identity, power, and justice. The discernment of different ethnoracial groups—different ‘races’—is an explicit or implicit feature of many genetic technologies, with sometimes devastating consequences for minorities. Scholars of genetic technologies, including Reardon, Fullwiley, TallBear, Kahn, Fujimura, Bliss, and Pollock, have critiqued the persistence of race-based genetic science, but were often reassured that the wide availability of gene sequencing would eventually end the use of race as a proxy for genetic difference. Once an individual’s whole gene sequence could be easily read, the argument went, their ethnoracial classification would become redundant. Yet, something very different has transpired. New technologies have been accompanied by the rise of ‘ethnicity-specific reference genomes’ that claim to be a better reference for short-read sequencing in specific ethnoracial groups. Ethnicity-specific reference genomes illustrate how race, ethnic, and national differences have remained embedded in the latest iteration of genome sequencing, despite earlier hopes that accurate and accessible full genome sequencing would see the end of the use of racial classifications.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    It should be noted that prominent defences of race science in various forms continued to be published alongside the critiques (e.g. Coon 1962; Herrnstein and Murray 1994).

  2. 2.

    He argues that, in the case of predicting drug responses, the ‘space for race’ is maintained by the unknown variability that genetics can never fully capture (Kahn 2013).

  3. 3.

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/assembly/GCF_000001405.39

  4. 4.

    For a detailed explanation of gene sequencing and structural variation, see Kowal and Llamas (2019).

  5. 5.

    A project a year earlier had produced a Danish ‘national pan-genome’, a similar idea to an ethnicity-specific reference genome, but this used a combination of older technologies rather than the newer long-read sequencing methods (Besenbacher et al. 2015).

  6. 6.

    Mitochondrial DNA is the DNA of mitochondria, small organelles within a cell that are passed on exclusively from your biological mother’s egg. The DNA of your mitochondria can be classified into a haplogroup that represents your direct maternal ancestral line. Y-chromosome DNA is inherited exclusively from fathers to sons and represents the direct paternal ancestral line.

  7. 7.

    On genomic sovereignty and national ‘branding’ in other jurisdictions, see Tupasela (2017), Schwartz-Marín and Restrepo (2013), Fortun (2008), and Sunder Rajan (2006).

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  1. Deakin University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Emma Kowal

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  1. Department of Educational Anthropology, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Maja Hojer Bruun

  2. Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Ayo Wahlberg

  3. Department of Business IT, IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Rachel Douglas-Jones

  4. Department of Educational Anthropology, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

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  5. Center for Medical Science & Technology Studies, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Klaus Hoeyer

  6. Department of Business and Management, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

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Kowal, E. (2022). Structuring Race into the Machine: The Spoiled Promise of Postgenomic Sequencing Technologies. In: Bruun, M.H., et al. The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7084-8_8

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