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

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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.