The Genealogy of a Gene: Patents, HIV/AIDS, and Race by Myles W. Jackson

Reviewed by: The Genealogy of a Gene: Patents, HIV/AIDS, and Raceby Myles W. Jackson Steven Epstein Myles W. Jackson. The Genealogy of a Gene: Patents, HIV/AIDS, and Race. Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2015. 352 pp. Ill. $37.00 (978-0-262-02866-0). “Find Out If You Are Resistant to HIV—NOW ONLY $199.00.” So reads an advertisement from the Canadian company PALFIR Human Genetics (p. 169), promoting its test to detect the presence of an allele that can confer immunity against HIV infection. The genetic variant in question is known as the Δ32mutation of a gene called CCR5, and the topic of Myles W. Jackson’s The Genealogy of a Geneis precisely this gene, but more broadly the recent historical confluence of science, commerce, and politics that makes such an ad both imaginable and significant. Discovered in the 1990s and patented soon afterward, CCR5is important primarily because it codes for a protein that enables HIV to fuse with the cells it infects. In providing a “genealogy” of this gene, Jackson establishes how “the definition and emergence of the CCR5gene were predicated on capital, laboratory practices, computer algorithms, statistical analyses, population genetics and biomedical studies, and historical and sociological studies” (p. 23). In this intriguing and exhaustively researched book, Jackson borrows from, but also distinguishes his work from, the line of historical scholarship that seeks to provide “biographies” of scientific objects. 1Because CCR5’s story is so recent and “is still unfolding” (p. 24), Jackson’s project is not so much a full biography as a genealogy in the sense described by Nietzsche and Foucault, with the goal of providing what the latter termed a “history of the present.” Fundamentally, Jackson uses the multifaceted social embeddedness of this gene as “a heuristic tool to probe the boundaries between science, technology, and society” (p. 15). That is, because of the particular ways in which the recent history of CCR5has intersected with a diverse set of social concerns, each chapter is able to take up a part of the story of the gene and treat it as a window onto a larger world. For example, the history of the patent application for CCR5becomes a way to address the very question of what it means for life forms to be patented, as well as the distinctions among intellectual property regimes in different countries. And the discovery that the resistance-conferring Δ32mutation is unequally distributed among human subpopulations becomes the vehicle to consider the broad topic of how understandings of race are being reconfigured by genomics. The project is not simply to survey various fields, though Jackson does it well. Throughout, Jackson seeks to use contingency and contrast to suggest how things might be otherwise, and he calls on historians to be cognizant of the political implications of their scholarship. Jackson’s knowledge of these various areas of modern bioscience and their sociopolitical dimensions is impressive, and he engages with the existing scholarly literature in useful ways. For example, he takes examples from recent developments in the biotech sector to contest STS scholars’ implicit portrayal of “Bio-capitalism” [End Page 151]as a “united front”: “It is not correct that all for-profit institutions are singing in unison against a unified nonprofit stance” (p. 86). But in the end, Jackson’s overviews, syntheses, and critiques are less helpful than they could be because the book is so oversaturated with technical details that the reader often swims through prose as thick as molasses. Jackson argues for the virtues of his approach. He declares, in a special note to the reader that precedes the main text: “Portions of this book . . . are technical. . . . Without these discussions, the book would be a history of science without the science, a trend that has become all too common of late” (p. ix). This proves to be fair warning. The opening pages of the book include half a page devoted to the distinctions between two different DNA and protein sequence alignment software programs, as well as passages like: “In addition, [Edward Berger’s] lab tested the effects of chemokines on...

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