Shifting Concepts of Genetic Disease

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.

Keywords: genetic disease, genomics, determinism