| Summary: | Medical geneticists began mapping the chromosomal infrastructure piece by piece in the 1970s by focusing on what was known about individual genetic disorders. Five decades later, their infrastructure had become an edifice for prevention, allowing today's expecting parents to choose to test prenatally for hundreds of disease-specific mutations using powerful genetic testing platforms. In Life Histories of Genetic Disease, Andrew J. Hogan explores how various diseases were "made genetic" after 1960, with the long-term aim of treating and curing them using gene therapy. In the process, he explains, these disorders were located in the human genome and became targets for prenatal prevention, while the ongoing promise of gene therapy remained on the distant horizon. In narrating the history of research that contributed to diagnostic genetic medicine, Hogan describes the expanding scope of prenatal diagnosis and prevention. He draws on case studies of Prader-Willi, fragile X, DiGeorge, and velo-cardio-facial syndromes to illustrate that almost all testing in medical genetics is inseparable from the larger-and increasingly "big data"--Oriented-aims of biomedical research.
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