Shifting Concepts of Genetic Disease

Abstract

For many years the rhetoric of the new genetics have been criticised for their inherent determinism, especially in the area of health. The move from genetics to genomics has meant that more than just individual genes will be looked at in the causation of disease. At the same time, the findings from the Human Genome Project have challenged the deterministic assumption of the one gene – one trait tenet. The concept of genetic disease, however, is still predominant and still expanding to include more conditions every day under its name. Here, I look at how the model of genetic causation of disease or what I have called the ‘gene model’ is becoming dominant and how this underlines a process of geneticisation, which does not seem to have stopped under the genomic perspective.