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the fi eld of personal genomics. Companies such as 23andMe are offer-
ing fee-based genotyping services for as little as $100. Complete genome
or exome sequencing is approaching the consumer price range. George
Church's Personal Genome Project offers a full-genome service to indi-
viduals willing to make their personal medical histories and full body
photographs, as well as their genomes, publicly available. 42 All these
projects aim to associate genotype with phenotype on the basis of statis-
tics. In particular, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are used to
discover correlations between mutations at specifi c genomic loci and the
presence of a phenotype or disease. The mechanism through which this
locus might act to cause the trait is usually unknown—the statistical
linkage is enough. A genetic profi le from 23andMe, for instance, pro-
vides the user with information about their “risk factors” for over two
hundred diseases, conditions, and traits (a few examples: celiac disease,
rheumatoid arthritis, alcohol fl ush reaction, bipolar disorder, statin re-
sponse, memory, male infertility). 43
The rise of personal genomics indicates the extension of the bio-
informatic paradigm into medicine. Just as our understanding of organ-
isms and their functionality is increasingly dominated by statistical tech-
niques applied to large data sets, our understanding of our own health,
our bodies, and our futures is being similarly reconstructed. The body
is no longer a collection of genes, but is rather becoming an accretion
of statistics, a set of probabilities that refer to “risk factors” for various
diseases and conditions. Paul Rabinow has argued that the genomic age
creates new regimes of associations between individuals:
The new genetics will cease to be a biological metaphor for
modern society and will become instead a circulation network
of identity terms and restriction loci, around which and through
which a truly new type of autoproduction will emerge, which
I call “biosociality.” . . . Through the use of computers, indi-
viduals sharing certain traits or sets of traits can be grouped
together in a way that . . . decontextualizes them from their
social environment. 44
Personal genomics is exactly this: a tool for tracking and computing risk
and using those data to build not only new “socialities,” but also new
“individualities.” This is Homo statisticus —a human constructed from
the statistical residue of his or her genome.
In personal genomics, we are a collection of probabilities of having
or acquiring particular traits; taking account of our own personal ge-
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