Doctoral Dissertation Research: What are our AIMs? Race, Genetics, and the Practice of Ancestry Informative Markers

该博士论文研究改进基金由美国国家科学基金会的科学、技术和社会项目支持，研究基因血统测试，这是一项具有重大社会和科学意义的新兴研究实践。直接面向消费者的血统检测最近引起了公众的广泛关注。祖先信息标记（AIMs）和相关的遗传研究方法有可能影响生物医学和社会对人类健康的理解，就像商业祖先测试影响个人和集体身份一样。在消除种族健康差异的政府和公共任务的背景下，祖先技术可能有助于产生国家资助的生物医学知识，这些知识预计将影响种族和族裔归属的人口如何管理疾病风险。因此，以祖先为基础的实践可能有助于“生物公民身份”：个人和群体认识到自己是生物存在，并利用这种知识，作为国家负责任的公民来管理自己的风险。通过对从事基于祖先的研究的遗传流行病学家的关键信息提供者访谈和参与者对基于祖先的实践的观察，本研究探讨了遗传流行病学中从基于种族的分层到基于祖先的分层的转变。该研究调查了当前的科学实践是如何告知并被告知风险和责任的概念，这些概念是新兴形式的生物公民的核心。本研究通过在一系列专业和机构背景下以及跨研究地点探索学科科学实践，扩展了关于遗传学、祖先和种族的少数但丰富的民族志研究，并将引起生物学公民学者和种族和遗传学学者的兴趣。该项目还可以帮助遗传流行病学家从面向社会的科学角度更好地确定基于祖先的研究实践的意义和重要性。

This doctoral dissertaton research improvement grant, supported by NSF's program in Science, Technology and Society, investigates genetic ancestry testing, an emerging research practice of great social and scientific salience. Direct-to-Consumer ancestry tests have recently gained widespread public attention. Ancestry Informative Markers (AIMs) and related genetic research methods have the potential to affect biomedical and societal understandings of human health as potently as commercial ancestry tests have affected personal and collective identity. Situated in the context of governmental and public mandates to eliminate racial health disparities, ancestry technologies may be instrumental to the production of state-sponsored biomedical knowledge that is expected to shape how racial and ethnically ascribed populations manage disease risk. Thus, ancestry-based practices may contribute "biological citizenship:" the ways in which individuals and groups come to know themselves as biological beings and with this knowledge, manage their risk as responsible citizens of the state. Through key informant interviews with genetic epidemiologists engaged in ancestry-based research and participant-observation of ancestry-based practices, this study examines the transition from race-based to ancestry-based stratification in genetic epidemiology. The research investigates how current scientific practices inform, and are informed by, the notions of risk and responsibility central to emerging forms of biological citizenship. This study extends the small but rich body of ethnographic research on genetics, ancestry, and race by exploring disciplinary scientific practices in a range of professional and institutional contexts and across research sites, and will be of interest to both scholars of biological citizenship and scholars of race and genetics. The project may also help genetic epidemiologists better identify the meaning and significance of ancestry-based research practices from a socially oriented view of the science.