I am Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine, USA. A historian and ethnographer of the life sciences, much of my current research focuses on the contemporary science, culture, and political economy of genomics. My previous work on the life sciences has covered the policy, scientific, and social history of the Human Genome Project in the U.S., the history of biotechnology, and the growth of commercial genomics and bioinformatics in the speculative economies of the 1990s. From 2006-2010 I was co-editor (with Kim Fortun) of Cultural Anthropology, the journal of the Society for Cultural Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association.
My most recent book is Genomics With Care (Duke University Press, 2023), an experimental ethnography of contemporary genomics and a deconstructive reading of science as a complex amalgam of cognition and affect, formal logics and tacit knowledge, statistics and ethics. By reading genomic writings together with writings on care, the book shows science to be a dense composite of affective and cognitive forces that drive scientists and the relations they form with their objects of research, with data, with truths, and with their community. Reading genomics with care shows how each resists definition yet is so entangled with the other as to become indistinguishable. The book analyzes four patterns of genomic care—curation, scrupulousness, solicitude, and friendship—seen in the conceptual, technological, social, and methodological changes that transpired as the genetics of the 1980s became the genomics of the 1990s, and then the “post-genomics” of the 2000s. By tracing the dense patterns made where care binds to science, the book shows how these patterns mark where scientists are driven to encounter structural double binds that are impossible to resolve, and yet are where scientific change and creativity arise.
I am also a leader in an effort to build a digital humanities platform, the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE), intended to support collaborative “empirical humanities” research projects of many kinds. Kim Fortun and I led the development of PECE based on our experience with The Asthma Files project to understand how individuals and organizations are working to address the global air quality crisis and epidemic incidence of asthma, and to advance understanding of factors that condition societal capacity to deal with complex problems such as environmental public health.
CV
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:
Longer:
Genomics with Care: Minding the Double Binds of Science. Duke University Press, 2023.
Promising Genomics: Iceland and DeCODE Genetics In a World of Speculation. University of California Press, 2008.
Major Works in Cultural Anthropology (4 vols.). 2009. Edited with Kim Fortun. London: Sage.
Muddling Through: Pursuing Science and Truths in the Twenty-First Century (co-authored with Herbert J. Bernstein). Washington, DC: Counterpoint Press, 1998. (Chosen as a Book of the Month Alternative Selection, Library of Science, June 1999) Excerpts: Muddling_through-_pursuing_science_and_truths_in_the_21st_century_By_Michael_Fortun-_Herbert_J._Bernstein FortunBernsteinChpt9(5)
Shorter:
2014 “What Toll Pursuit: Affective Assemblages in Genomics and Postgenomics.” In Postgenomics, ed. Hallam Stevens and Sarah Richardson, Duke University Press. Ch_03 Fortun-1
2013 (co-authored with Erik Bigras, Brandon Costelloe-Kuehn, Tahereh Saheb, Jerome Crowder, Dan Price, Kim Fortun) “Asthma, Culture, and Cultural Analysis,” Heterogeneity in Asthma: Translational Profiling & Phenotyping. Series: Advances In Experimental Medicine And Biology. Springer. Chap 20, Asthma, Culture and Cultural Analysis
2012 “Genomics Scandals and Other Volatilities of Promising,” in Lively Capital, ed. Kaushik Sunder Rajan (Duke University Press).
2009 “Genes In Our kNot.” Handbook of Genetics and Society: Mapping the New Genomic Era, Paul and Margaret Lock (eds.). London: Routledge. GenesInOurkNot
“For An Ethics of Promising, Or, A Few Kind Words About James Watson.” New Genetics and Society 24/2:157-173. August 2005.for an ethics of promising
“Scientific Imaginaries and Ethical Plateaus in Contemporary U.S. Toxicology” (with Kim Fortun), American Anthropologist 107(1):43-54. March 2005.
“The Use of Race Variables in Genetic Studies of Complex Traits and the Goal of Reducing Health Disparities” (with Evelynn Hammonds, Patricia King, Caryn Lerman, Rayna Rapp, Alexandra Shields, and Patrick Sullivan), American Psychologist 60 (1):77-103. January 2005.
“Celera Genomics: The Race for the Human Genome Sequence.” Encyclopedia of Human Genetics. London: Macmillan, 2003. (http://www.naturereference.com/ehg/ehg.htm)
“Fluctuating About Zero, Taking Nothing’s Measure.” Pp. 121-160 in George Marcus, ed., Zeroing In On the Year 2000: Late Editions 8. University of Chicago Press, 2000. fluctuating
“Entangled States: Quantum Teleportation and ‘The Willies’.” In George Marcus, ed., Paranoia within Reason: A Casebook on Conspiracy as Explanation (Late Editions 6). University of Chicago Press, 1999. entangled states
Projects
You have a blog??!! 🙂
Yes, and there’s your measure of what a lackadaisical blogger I am.