What kind of people is biotechnology turning us into? ‘we’ are no more or less than the users of it, who might be anywhere, although the attendant issues discussed here reflect specifically Euro-American aspirations and concerns. Over the past twenty-five years, biotechnology has provided some powerful food for thought, challenges to how we users of it imagine society and how we imagine our relations to one another. Public opinion has, for example, seized on the idea that the new genetics is making new kinds of persons out of us. Some see these new persons as ultra-individuals. But the new genetics also makes new connections, and here there are some surprises – people find themselves related in unexpected ways. Then again, the kind of people we might be becoming will depend a bit on what we already are, and we are not always quite what we seem. If ours is an age of individualism, as we constantly tell ourselves, and biotechnology feeds into that, then what exactly is biotechnology feeding? Let me start with a case.

AN AGE OF INDIVIDUALISM

Here is a slice of ‘ordinary life’ (after Edwards 2000), even if the circumstances that bring it into public view are not ordinary. It concerns grandparents and grandchildren – two girls – and how much they see of one another.