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In 1992, at the start of the surprisingly short decade’s march toward the sequencing of the human genome, one of its key initiators, geneticist Walter Gilbert, claimed that “one will be able to pull a CD out of one’s pocket and say, ‘Here is a human being; it’s me.’”1 Gilbert’s brilliant piece of theater was echoed by other leading molecular biologists in their campaign to win public support and enthusiasm for the Human Genome Project (HGP). It seemed not to matter how often the biologists employed the same theatrical device, whether in California or at London’s Institute for Contemporary Arts: holding up a cd to a spellbound audience and saying, “this is human life itself” was a brilliantly chosen trope. The cd, so familiar to the audience of a high-tech society, was recruited to symbolize the merger of molecularization and digitalization heralded by the developing HGP. At once a science and a technology, this technoscience of human genomics simultaneously offered a new definition of human nature and new, promethean powers to repair and even redesign that nature.

DNA and genomics dominated the media throughout the 1990s, with its deterministic gene talk and genes for everything from the most severe diseases to compulsive shopping and homelessness. While the cd played its part in the popularization of the HGP, it was the representation of DNA’s double helix that came to be the dominant signifier of life itself. More subversively, numbers of graphic artists saw the potential surveillance powers of genomics, striking a more critical note than the CDs or the double helix by, instead, showing people with bar-coded foreheads. Here human nature was reduced to a mere commodity with no agency, to be read at the checkout counter.

The explosive growth of genomics, with its relatively subdued cultural debate, was not alone. Another powerful and expanding field, namely, neurobiology, led to the 1990s being nominated by the National Institutes of Health as the Decade of the Brain. (Europe was slower; its Brain Decade started about five years later.) By 2009, on both sides of the pond, neuroscientists claimed that advances in brain science had been so substantial that it had become the Decade of the Mind. Just as the double helix became the symbol of the HGP, so have the vivid, false-color skull-shaped images locating the “sites” of brain activity come to symbolize the new neuroscience. These sites include not only well-understood regions within the brain, such as those associated with vision and speech, but also new ones, like regions thought to be associated with London taxi-drivers’ knowledge of the London streets,2 for example, or with “romantic love.”3 Londoners were delighted to learn the location of their cabbies’ “knowledge,” persuaded by the high-tech images one could see in any newspaper. For those humanists who understand the concept of romantic love as originating with the medieval troubadours, the claim by leading imager Semir Zeki that this is a universal brain-located human phenomenon, unaffected by culture or history, is distinctly challenging. . . .

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Endnotes

• 1Walter Gilbert, “A Vision of the Grail,” in The Code of Codes: Scientific and Social Issues in the Human Genome Project, ed. Daniel J. Kevles and Leroy Hood (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); quoted in Amade M’charek, The Human Genome Diversity Project: An Ethnography of Scientific Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
• 2Eleanor A. Maguire, David G. Gadian, Ingrid S. Johnsrude, Catriona D. Good, John Ashburner, Richard S. J. Frackowiak, and Christopher D. Frith, “Navigation-Related Structural Change in the Hippocampi of Taxi Drivers,” Proceedings of the National �����Ƶ of Sciences 97 (2000): 4398–4403.
• 3Semir Zeki, Splendors and Miseries of the Brain: Love, Creativity, and the Quest for Human Happiness (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008).