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Health & Place 9 (2003) 151–161
Reading maps of the genes: interpreting the spatiality ofgenetic knowledge
Edward Hall*
Department of Geography, University of Dundee, Dundee, Scotland DD1 4HN, UK
Abstract
Genetics has become the pre-eminent interpretation of the body and health and illness. This paper engages with a
central technique and metaphor of the new genetics—gene mapping. Through an exploration of the process of gene
mapping, the paper argues that the genetic material of the body is spatialised and transformed into a knowable and
manipulable entity. Three interpretations of this spatial transformation of the body’s materiality are discussed, in turn
drawing on Foucault’s notion of the construction of medical knowledge, the deconstruction of geographical maps and
Haraway’s ‘fetishised’ conception of the gene map. The paper concludes by considering contestations to this dominant
discourse, and begins to construct an alternative spatialisation of the body that attempts to ‘place’ the gene more
appropriately in a socially-embedded body and health.
r 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Genetics; Maps; Body; Health; Spatialisation
Introduction
Genetics has become the pre-eminent interpretation,
and the gene the prime signifier, of the human body and
health and illness. This dominant ‘genocentric’ discourse
is producing an embedded knowledge of direct and
deterministic relationships between genes and an ever-
widening spectrum of physiological and psychological
conditions (Lippman, 1992). The notion of ‘the gene for’
now sits firmly within clinical and popular health
discourses and the gene’s ‘iconic’ status has extended
beyond health to matters of individual and social
behaviour (Nelkin and Lindee, 1995).
The ‘new’ genetic knowledge is embedded within and
extends the biomedical interpretation of health and the
body, and continues the narrowing and penetration of
the medical gaze into the body. It reproduces the key
elements of the biomedical understanding: the specific
location of disease and treatment in the body’s internal
geography, the conceptual model of the body as a
machine of individual parts with distinct roles, and the
notion of the body as an entity determined by its internal
environment (Conrad, 1999). Importantly, though, the
biomedical discourse is also extended with the produc-
tion of genetic knowledge—the sense of direct relation
between gene and disease has produced two (opposing)
responses, firstly, a ‘fatalism’ of genetically ‘caused’, and
therefore unassailable, illness and disease (Seniora et al.,
1999) and, secondly, a sense of hope/confidence that
genetic knowledge may/will produce direct genetic
solutions to these seemingly direct genetic problems.
As Rose and Rose observe, the new genetic ‘discoveries’
seem to ‘‘offer to eliminate illness, prolong life, grant our
children enhanced intelligence and better looks—a
cornucopia of technological goodies undreamed of even
in the science fiction of prior generations’’ (Rose and
Rose, 2001, p. 4). The claims of a ‘revolution’ in body
knowledge and disease diagnosis and treatment, claims
that receive regular coverage in the media are, as with all
such claims of final and complete knowledge, overstated
(Foucault, 1973). However, whatever the material health
and medical benefits, and whatever the issues inherent in
holding such knowledge, the new genetics has gained a
powerful hold on the bodily imagination (of the West)
and has challenged many long-standing claims of social*Tel.: +44-1382-348276; fax: +44-1382-344434.
E-mail address: [email protected] (E. Hall).
1353-8292/03/$ - see front matter r 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/S1353-8292(03)00003-0
construction of gender, race and age, in addition to
health and illness.
The body, as a site of representation, as a socially-
embedded and constructed entity, and as a source of
meaning and identity, is now an established sub-field of
research within human geography (Bell and Valentine,
1995; Pile and Thrift, 1995; Longhurst, 1995; Hall,
1999). Within the geography of health, there has been
limited and reluctant use of the theoretical debate on the
body—Kearns (1995), Parr (1998), Hall (2000) and
Moss and Dyck (2001) are exceptions, noting the messy
complexity of bodies and their corporeal reality. Hall
(2000) goes further, calling for an engagement with
biology in its recognition of the centrality of the
organism—including the human body—to life. The
nervousness of many health geographers in including
the body and biology is rooted in the long-standing
theoretical and political rejection of biological determin-
ism and the recognition of the explanatory power of
social constructionist accounts of health, underpinned
by an epistemological and methodological distancing of
human geographers from the natural sciences (Massey,
1999a).
The new genetics presents both a renewed difficulty
and a potential opportunity for geography to engage
with matters of the body and biology, and to traverse
seemingly impossible theoretical and disciplinary gulfs.
Whatmore (1999, p. 259) comments that, ‘‘Given
geography’s claim to ‘span’ or ‘integrate’ the natural
and the social sciences, our relative silence on questions
of biotechnology, and their social and environmental
implications is, to say the least, peculiar’’, when, she
argues, ‘‘These questions are, in themselves, amongst the
most vital confronting technical, social and ethical
agendas for the coming century’’ (Whatmore, 1999).
Whatmore suggests an answer to her own question of
what geography’s place could be in the life science era,
by proposing a geography that ‘takes life seriously’
through an exploration of the spaces ‘‘teeming with the
stuff of which all our futures will be made’’ (Whatmore,
1999, p. 260). Castree (1999, p. 764) claims that the
issues of nature—social relations that genetic develop-
ments raise places it firmly within the geographical realm
of inquiry. A critical engagement that draws on long-
standing synthetical practices within geography is
possible and, Castree argues, necessary if, ‘‘geography
wishes to establish its relevance to our present and
future world’’. The theoretical and methodological
realities do not as yet equal the desire of this
engagement, but a rejuvenated biogeography is posi-
tioning itself as the focus for geographical interpretation
of the new genetics, biotechnology, and other geogra-
phies that transgress the nature-society boundary, such
as cities (Hinchliffe, 1999). An engagement with biology
and with the science and practice of biotechnology can,
in very many ways, draw on, and add to, the current
conceptual concerns of biogeography: recognition of the
complexity of natural systems, the flows and networks
operating in the interactions between internal and
external environments, and the proper ‘placing of life’
in the scheme of things (Spencer and Whatmore, 2001,
p. 140). A full day session at the RGS–IBG Annual
Conference 2002 entitled ‘Genetic Geographies’ was an
early conflation of this; through a particular engage-
ment, this paper is a preliminary offering.
The paper takes the object of the ‘gene map’ and the
practice of ‘gene mapping’ as a prime site and process of
the genetic interpretation of the body and health and,
simultaneously, as a notable signifier of the new genetics
era. Gene maps represent the relative and absolute
positions of genetic sequences on the 23 pairs of
chromosomes that sit within the nucleus of almost every
cell in the human body. The representation of this
apparent ‘geography of the genes’ is central to the
construction of knowledge about the ‘(mal)function’ of
genes and their relation to bodily (mal)function. Maps
too remain the prime signifier of the geographical
discipline, surviving the critical ravages of postmodern
and cultural ‘turns’ by making the transition from a
presentation of claimed actuality to a mode of meta-
phor, while maintaining their representational and
explanatory claim.1 The use of the term and the
apparent adoption of the process within genetics
demands our attention. This paper explores the making
and meaning of maps of the genes, and considers ways
of interpreting their representation of the spatiality of
the body, and of health and illness.
The paper is in two main sections: first, the object of
the gene map and the process of gene mapping are
explained and the nature of their spatiality and
interpretation explored; second, three possible interpre-
tations of the spatiality of the gene map are set out; in
conclusion, an alternative spatialisation is developed,
one that attempts to ‘place’ the gene more appropriately
in the body and in discourses of health and illness.
Mapping the genes
The gene map is the central analytical tool of the new
genetic knowledge. It operates both as an information
‘pool’ in the gathering of data and as a framework for
the subsequent interpretation of genetic information and
the linking to conditions of health and illness. The
1This counters to some degree Martin’s (2000, p. 5) claim
that maps ‘‘continue to recede from our geographical imagina-
tion’’. There are two reasons for this: firstly, as Martin
concedes, developments in mapping continue apace in the field
of GIS and, secondly, the map and mapping play a central, if
not literal, role in the conceptualisation of space and spatial
relations (see Pile and Thrift, 1995).
E. Hall / Health & Place 9 (2003) 151–161152
importance of the technical and conceptual role of the
gene map is that it ‘‘provides the only connection
between biological reality and the underlying genome. In
many cases, without genetic maps nothing else would
followy Detailed maps provide the only means by
which the genes that contribute to disease susceptibility
can be identified and ultimately characterised’’ (Sudb-
ery, 1998, p. 54–55). It is the key operational tool and
metaphor, ‘making sense’ of the materiality and provid-
ing the means for further analysis and application. As
such, genetic maps share some of the key characteristics
of orthodox geographical maps, as will be further
discussed in the second section of the paper. However,
it is important to establish at this point that genetic
maps are of quite a different format to what we usually
understand as maps: genetic ‘maps’ consist of series of
positional codings of genetic sequences along the
chromosome, with no graphical expression of these
‘co-ordinates’.
The paper argues that in the process of gene mapping
the genetic material of the body is structured, organised
and spatialised. A gene map’s ability to ‘make sense’ of
the ‘genomic landscape’ is founded on this transforma-
tion of biological materiality into spatial information,
By making something spatial it can be known,
interpreted and ultimately controlled or manipulated
(Massey, 1999b, c).
There are three main forms of gene maps—linkage,
physical and expression—each telling a particular
spatial story about the genes and the body and
together forming a powerful spatialised ‘body of knowl-
edge’ of the human genome. It is to these that we
now turn.
Linkage maps
Linkage or genetic maps represent the relative
positions of individual genes along the chromosome.
They are constructed through the study of the frequency
of associated inheritance (known as ‘recombination
frequencies’) of certain characteristics at reproduction.
The characteristics may be physical features (pheno-
types), such as disease, or they may be features of the
gene sequence (genotype). These characteristics combine
freely across chromosomes at the moment of reproduc-
tion, except, as is often the case, when they are on the
same area of the chromosome. Closely positioned genes
are often inherited together and so the associated
characteristics appear linked as well. The relative
position of genes can therefore be represented by the
frequency of recombination—the greater the frequency,
the stronger the linkage and the closer the genes on the
chromosome. This process continues iteratively until the
‘positions’ of gene sequences can be determined (Dib
et al., 1996). The characteristics selected are known as
‘genetic markers’ as they provide fixed points of
reference against which to compare other genetic
material and, more importantly here, as ‘landmarks’ to
locate another gene, for example one apparently
connected to a particular health or illness condition,
through the level of recombination frequency between
the gene and the genetic marker. To achieve compre-
hensive and ‘accurate’ linkage maps, three significant
methodological manoeuvres are undertaken: firstly,
biological samples from a set of Mormon (Utah, USA)
and Venezuelan families are used by the ‘Centre d’Etude
Polymorphism Humain’ (CEPH) bio-technical research
institute in Paris, France, to construct the reference
genetic markers of the so-called ‘pedigree’ inheritance;
secondly, a mathematical technique—Log Ratio of
Odds or LOD—is used to calculate the ‘likelihood’ of
linked inheritance; thirdly, to increase the number of
genetic markers and so the coverage of the linkage map,
new markers, based not on phenotypic characteristics
(which are too few in number), but instead on
differences in sequences in parts of the DNA between
individuals, are made.
Through chemical and genealogical analysis at the
genetic and familial scales, respectively, a ‘comprehen-
sive’ linkage gene map has been produced (Dib et al.,
1996). The story it tells is one of relationships between
particular genetic elements of the chromosomes and
between the genes and chromosomes and the character-
istics of the body (between the genotype and the
phenotype). Indeed, a direct relationship between the
genotype and the phenotype is the central initial
assumption of the linkage map (Curran, 1997). In the
process of this mapping, the notion of genetics as solely
one of inheritance, that is, as a story of chronology and
genealogy, has been transformed into a story of
relational spatiality. The linkage map makes the relative
spatial positions of genetic sequences along the chromo-
some matter to the operation of the genes and their
effects on the body. Importantly, this transformation is
one that has had to have been made, through a
transformation of the genetic material itself. To transfer
the story of inheritance to the story of genetic relational
spatiality, the genetic material has had to be reimagined
as spatialised. The methodological manoeuvres neces-
sary to achieve this transformation reveal its produced
nature as they involve, respectively, the ‘folding in’ to
the map of the ‘average’ human genome of genealogical
information from ‘ideal’ families, mathematical exten-
sions of genetic activity, and the creation of landmark
features by the chemical manipulation of the gene
sequence. The internal spatialising of the genetic
sequences and the production of a framework of gene
location also makes it possible for the connection
between genotype and phenotype to be concretised—if
the (relative) location of a gene sequence is determined,
then it’s ‘causative relationship’ to a bodily character-
istic can be more easily ‘pinned down’.
E. Hall / Health & Place 9 (2003) 151–161 153
Linkage maps involve a spatial transformation that
objectifies the genetic material, an essential process in
the production of knowledge of the genes (Hinchliffe,
2001; Rheinberger, 1997). And once something has been
spatialised (and mapped) there is no going back.
Physical maps
Linkage maps spatialise the genome, and in doing so
produce a ‘framework’ of a landscape to be mapped in
greater detail. Physical maps of the genes represent the
‘actual’ or ‘precise’, as opposed to relative, locations of
gene DNA sequences along the chromosome. The
principal purpose of physical gene maps is the identifica-
tion of a gene sequence and the subsequent listing of the
‘base pairs’ that make up the sequence.2 As they
‘‘provide the scaffold upon which the sequence [is]
assembled’’ (Dennis et al., 2001, p. 813), they are the key
objects in the overall mapping process. As with linkage
maps a number of methodological techniques have been
devised to ‘locate’ the gene sequences ‘precisely’ on the
chromosome. The principal method makes many copies
of the DNA sequence where the particular gene is
thought to lie—identified by the linkage map—and
‘overlaps’ these copies. By overlapping the copies or
‘clones’ the known sequences (drawn from the genetic
markers of the linkage map) can be matched or aligned
and the parts that do not match identified. It is at these
places where the genetic material does not correspond
that the physical location of the sought gene is stated to
be (Stewart and Cox, 1997). An alternative method—
‘Radiation Hybrid’ mapping—determines the position
of gene sequences through assessing how known genetic
markers maintain their relative positions when genetic
material is irradiated (Leach and O’Connell, 1997).
Physical maps make the spatial ‘claim’ of representing
the ‘‘actual location of DNA sequences [genes] in the
genome’’ (Sudbery, 1998, p. 69, emphasis added),
reinforcing this claim through the assignment of codes
of location. Unpacking the making of physical maps,
primarily through the ‘clone’ method, reframes this
claim somewhat—clone maps determine gene sequence
location through an iterative method of deduction
through comparison of known locations, which them-
selves are based on markers produced through linkage
mapping. The ‘actual’ location becomes a ‘calculated’
position, the code of the gene sequence location a code
of relative position. Radiation Hybrid mapping, which
claims ‘greater accuracy’ than the clone technique,
produces only a ‘confidence’ of certainty (Stewart and
Cox, 1997, p. 91). The ‘precise’ physical map of the
genes loses its sheen, and becomes a set of estimates,
claims, approximations and predictions of the constitu-
tion of genetic material along the chromosome (Stewart
and Cox, 1997, p. 74; Bork and Copley, 2001).
This, importantly, is not arguing that physical genetic
maps are inaccurate or lack technical rigour, rather that
their claim to ‘accuracy’ is one that reflects their
fundamental assumption and their purpose. There is a
deeply embedded assumption of a physical nature that
pre-exists society and science. The consequence of this is
that over time this natural ‘reality’ will become known in
totality (Hinchliffe, 2001). This assumption produces the
purpose of physical gene maps, i.e. to accurately locate
the components of the genome and, further, this is
understood as an achievable goal. The importance,
therefore, of physical maps is their claim, rather than
their actuality. Their claim is one of accuracy, precise-
ness and, crucially, of the ability to know, intimately and
ultimately, a spatial area. Uncertainty of knowledge,
and the intrusion of other natural-social influences into
the space of the genome, is something to be eliminated
rather than embraced (Hinchliffe, 2001).
Expression maps
The third type of genetic map and perhaps, in the
context of the underlying drive of the new genetics to
tackle issues of health and illness, the most crucial, is the
expression map (Schuler et al., 1996). As has been noted,
not all genetic sequence material or DNA is connected
to the action of proteins in the cells of the body (and
hence, the claim goes, to the process of physiological
and psychological conditions). Expression maps limit
their interest and coverage to the action or ‘expression’
of gene sequences or, more precisely, to the presence of
mRNA (messenger RiboNucleic Acid), the chemical
‘link’ between a gene sequence and the change/action of
a protein.
Expression maps make the connection between the
spatiality of the genetic material and the ‘activity’ or
effect of this material in the body. This connection
marks the key claim of the new genetics, the direct and
causal relationship between genetic and bodily materi-
ality, a claim that is keenly disputed on two grounds,
firstly, that genes only operate as part of a larger
biological system (Fox Keller, 1994) and, secondly, that
equating ‘fine-grained’ genetic information with ‘coarse-
grained’ bodily disease information is conceptually and
practically problematic (Lloyd, 1994). More precisely,
the claim is based on the spatialising of the genetic
materiality—it matters for their effect where genes are
said to be located—and its consequent spatialising of the
(mal) functioning of the body. Without the construction
of their spatial ordering, genetic material could not be
understood as having a direct and causal effect on the
body. Expression maps make the claim that space
2 ‘Base pairs’ are the chemical elements of DNA, so-named
because they are arranged in a sequence of repeating pairs. The
four chemicals that compose the two pairs are adenine (A) and
thymine (T), and guanine (G) and cytosine (C).
E. Hall / Health & Place 9 (2003) 151–161154
matters, space is made and the nature of its making has
an impact on our understanding of the very object it
seeks to represent (Massey, 1995).
A map of the human genome
The production of a ‘complete’ gene map of the
human genome required the alignment of the three types
of genetic maps, using the common reference point of a
set of genetic markers (Hudson et al., 1995). The
integration of these maps required two further align-
ments, one theoretical and the other institutional-
political. Theoretically, the spatialised understanding of
genetic material developed through the gene mapping
process involved three distinct episodes, the production
of a spatial framework (in linkage maps), the detailed
locating of genetic material within the framework (in
physical maps) and the connecting of genetic material
and the characteristics of the body (in expression maps).
To produce the genomic map these three episodes or
‘conceptual techniques’ (Rabinow, 1996, p. 4) have to be
joined together into a complete story—the map of the
human genome encapsulates a progressive and deepen-
ing spatialisation of the genes and the body. Institution-
ally-politically, the making of the map of the human
genome has required the alignment of scientific,
economic, cultural, industrial and political organisations
and interests, operationalised through the ‘Human
Genome Project’. Such has been the prescribed task of
mapping and sequencing all of the genetic material of
the human genome that an international consortium of
biotechnical laboratories have undertaken different
aspects of the task. This collaboration has been financed
and organised by national governments, supported by
political leaders and involved extensive collaborations
with biotechnological and pharmaceutical companies.
The Human Genome Project, begun in the late 1980s
in the USA and funded initially by the US Department
of Energy3 and later by the National Institutes of
Health, has become an international network of 20
laboratories4 (Baltimore, 2001) funded by governments
and charities, and the whole process of this ‘big science’
maintained and sustained by repeated governmental,
medical and scientific claims that it is a scientific
‘endeavour’ that will produce significant health and
medical benefits for global society (Cranor, 1994). The
stated ‘goals’ for the ‘completion’ of the Human
Genome Project (Collins and Galas, 1993) included a
‘complete’ linkage map, a complete physical map, the
identification of genes through expression maps and the
sequencing or listing of all the human DNA.5 An-
nouncements of ‘completion’ have been made across the
time span of the project—the complete linkage map in
1995 (Sudbery, 1998), the physical map in 2000
(International Human Genome Mapping Consortium,
2001a), the increasing number of diseases ‘linked’ to
specific genes (International Human Genome Mapping
Consortium, 2001b)—most significantly, in terms of the
new genetics place in health and political discourse, the
announcements of the ‘draft’ and ‘complete’ sequence of
the ‘base pair’ chemical components of the human
genome, in June 2000 (Guardian, 2000; Independent,
2000) and February 2001 (Guardian, 2001), respectively.
These ‘achievements’, likened to the moon landing and
‘splitting the atom’ (Guardian, 2000), have been a
necessary part of the story of the Human Genome
Project, a series of ‘end points’ to a singular, definite
exercise. While most geneticists always knew and
emphasised that the nature of the genome and the body
is such that a study of it will never be complete, the
mapping and sequencing had to have an end to maintain
the alignment of financial, political, medical, bioindus-
trial and public support and interest (Judson, 2001).
Rabinow (1999) has described the French element of
the Human Genome Project as an ‘assemblage’ of
interests, public and private, material and conceptual,
medical and emotional, financial and political, that
‘come together’ in a network, but always under internal
and external pressures. Hinchliffe (2001) notes how the
process of scientific policy-making and practice is often
imagined as a benign process of reaching a clear and
achievable end goal, with conflicts, power relations and
contested imaginations marginalised. The alignment of
the diverse interests in the Human Genome Project is
commonly represented as such an exercise, united by a
common purpose. There is a very particular reason for
this: for the map of the genome to be completed, a high
degree of certainty was necessary about achieving the
goal—to secure continued funding, to maintain the
consortium of diverse parties, and to make the claim of
‘total’ knowledge possible. The mapping of the human
genome is indeed a remarkable achievement, but
perhaps for quite different reasons to the ones com-
monly cited.
3The US Department of Energy has a long-standing research
interest in radiation-caused genetic mutation through its
nuclear energy and weapons programme (Wilkie, 1994).4For example, in the UK, the Sanger Centre funded by the
Wellcome Trust and the Medical Research Council and, in
France, CEPH, funded by the French Government and the
‘Genethon’ laboratory funded by the Muscular Dystrophy
Association (Rabinow, 1999).
5Other goals of the Human Genome Project included:
technology development (e.g. automatic data collection), model
organisms (simpler organisms, e.g. the mouse and bread yeast,
are used to inform human genome investigations), informatics
(accelerated processing and analysis of genetic information),
ethical, legal and social issues, training, technology transfer and
outreach (Collins and Galas, 1993).
E. Hall / Health & Place 9 (2003) 151–161 155
With the completion of the mapping and sequencing
process, the assemblage of interests has begun to
fracture, primarily over the issue of the ownership of
and access to the genetic data. The commercial
significance of genetic information has produced con-
cerns over the ‘patenting’ and exploitation of human
genetic data (Castree, 2001). Just as orthodox geogra-
phical mapping ‘produces’ territorial space for exploita-
tion, so genetic mapping transforms genetic material
into a space ripe for commercialisation; this is explored
in more detail in the second section of the paper.
Interpreting maps of the genes
The gene map is the inner picture of the species. It’s
immortal part. The gene map may tell us not just
where the genes are, but why they are there (Ajl,
1979, quoted in Wilkie, 1994, p. 86).
Gene mapping is a process of ‘making spatial sense’ of
the chemical material that constitutes the chromosomes
and which is linked to protein activity. In making
linkage, physical and expression maps, a structured and
detailed progressive spatialisation is made of the body.
This in turn transforms the body into a bounded space,
as a framework must have a limitation, and hence into a
potentially knowable space. Put another way, gene maps
arguably have a dual (but linked) purpose, one of which
could not exist without the other: firstly, to ‘discover’ the
relative and ‘actual’ location of genetic sequences and,
secondly, to make it possible to understand genetic
material in this manner. In this section, three possible
interpretations of this spatialisation of genetic material
and genetic knowledge will be discussed, but first some
consideration is given to the dominant interpretation of
the organisation of genetic knowledge.
The announcement of the ‘completion’ of the ‘first
draft’ of the full sequence of the human genome in June
2000 was accompanied by a plethora of metaphors, most
notably concerning language and written knowledge.
The base pairs of DNA were likened to ‘letters’, the
genes to words, and the genome to the ‘Book of Life’
(Independent, 2000; Ridley, 1999; Kay, 1999). This
(Christian) religious twist was amplified by US President
Clinton’s phrase describing the process of the Human
Genome Project, ‘‘We are learning the language in
which God created life’’ (Independent, 2000, p. 1). The
media and politicians were drawing on a longstanding
metaphor for genetic knowledge discovery. For exam-
ple, Wilkie (1994) has likened the assemblage of genetic
knowledge within the body through genetic mapping
and sequencing to the collective of knowledge contained
within a library, and the purpose of the Human Genome
Project to ‘gather’ this information,
It is as if those engaged upon the Human Genome
Project have wandered into a vast library, with the
genes corresponding to the books, intent on reading
every word (1994, p. 41).
Wilkie further likens the 23 pairs of chromosomes to
the shelves on which the genes/books are located, and
the mapping of the genes as a, ‘‘process of building up
an index or catalogue of the genes’’ (Wilkie, 1994). The
metaphor of the library embodying the sense of an
existing, finite set of legitimated knowledge contained in
the books/genes on the shelves/chromosomes sits
comfortably within the discourse of the gene as the
‘ultimate’ and reducible knowledge of the body—with
the chromosome, cell and organism playing the ‘hosting’
role—a knowledge that, if we read/experiment for long
enough (and it is assumed we have the ability do so) will
reveal itself in totality. The linkage and physical gene
maps in the library metaphor have distinct roles: a
linkage map is likened to the author index, where all the
references to books are in order but without details of
location; the physical map indicates the specific ‘shelf’
location of the book. This metaphor seems to confirm
the role of gene maps as indexes and wayfinders, as
frameworks for the understanding of the spatial
structure and contents of the genome. The library
metaphor has a further important consequence. If we
return to the phrase, ‘‘It is as if those engaged on the
Human Genome Project had wandered into a vast
library’’ (Wilkie, 1994, p. 41, emphasis added), the
imagining of the chromosomes and genes (and organism)
as a pre-existing spatial knowledge waiting to be
‘discovered’, establishes both the purpose—to ‘read
every word of every book’—and the method—‘to build
up an index or catalogue’—of gene mapping and
sequencing. The biological materiality becomes the
spatialised knowledge and, in the crucial turn, the
tightly defined, solely internal, assemblage of linked
relations, physical locations and expressions becomes
the reality of the genes, chromosomes and body.
The library metaphor of structured and finite (and
knowable) genetic material is dominant in popular and
scientific discourse on the new genetics, a metaphor, this
paper is arguing, that masks the complex nature of the
genes, both conceptually and practically, and the
method and purpose of gene mapping, i.e. the spatialised
transformation of the genes. At this point, the paper sets
out three possible interpretations of the spatialising of
genetic materiality in gene mapping.
A new spatialisation of the body
Foucault’s ‘archaeology’ of medical knowledge in
‘The Birth of the Clinic’ (1973) unearths the construc-
tion, through institutional (clinics) and discursive (the
medical ‘gaze’ and the opening of corpses) practices, of a
E. Hall / Health & Place 9 (2003) 151–161156
new ‘truth’ of the body and health and illness. More
specifically, the study is concerned with spatialised
transformations of knowledge of the body in two
particular historical periods. The three ‘spatialisations’
identified by Foucault—primary, secondary and ter-
tiary—each involved a particular (re)imagining of the
body and the relationship between the elements of the
body and disease and illness.6 The paper argues that the
transformation and spatialisation of genetic material
and knowledge involved in gene mapping has reso-
nances of all three spatialisations and presents possibi-
lities for our understanding of the new genetic
knowledge.
The ‘primary spatialisation’ or ‘configuration’ of
disease describes the classification of disease and the
body in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the building up
of medical knowledge through the construction of
tables, known as ‘nosologies’. In the spatialisation the
tables of the organisation of disease became the material
form of the disease itself, ‘‘the classificatory ruley
appears as the immanent logic of morbid forms, the
principle of their decipherment, and the semantic rule of
their definition’’ (Foucault, 1973, p. 4). Such a
transformation of materiality is evident in gene maps,
as biological material is structured and ordered—
spatialised—in order to be known and in turn this
structure ‘turns back’ into the body as the genetic
material is then open to transformation itself. The
‘secondary spatialisation’ or ‘localisation’ of disease in
the late 18th and early 19th centuries imagined the ‘deep
spaces’ (Foucault, 1973, p. 5) of the body as a
‘geography’ of disease, where each condition had a
specific location, and which were represented by detailed
anatomical drawings and atlases, ‘‘Disease is no longer a
bundle of characters disseminated here and there over
the surface of the body y it is a set of forms and
deformationsy brought together in sequence according
to a geography’’ (Foucault, 1973, p. 136). The linking of
physiological conditions to precise bodily locations has
taken a further, and more bodily penetrating, step with
gene mapping. The connecting of bodily (mal)function
to particular parts of the genetic sequence produces a
new geography of disease in the body that shares the
Foucauldian sense of direct causal relationship. Fou-
cault’s ‘tertiary spatialisation’ describes the institutions,
language and practice by which, ‘‘a disease is circum-
scribed, medically invested, isolated, divided up into
closed privileged regions, or distributed throughout care
centres’’ (1973, p. 16). Gene mapping is a process of
temporary assemblages of such institutions, primarily
biotechnical laboratories, clinical medical research sites
and pharmaceutical companies (Rabinow, 1999) as the
body’s genetic material is penetrated across the global
field.
Importantly, Foucault’s analysis critiques the produc-
tion of this medicalised information, noting in particular
the role of the wider body and social spaces, seemingly
outwith the realm of the medical (and genetic) body. In
the primary spatialisation, Foucault argued that there
was an unspoken recognition of the complex body
beyond the classification; in the secondary, the locating
of disease to particular parts of the body did not imply a
set of isolated organs, rather the body was clearly an
interconnected ‘organic space’; and in the tertiary,
Foucault recognises the broader ‘social space’ within
which this production of knowledge occurs, the ‘‘poli-
tical struggles, demands and utopias, economic con-
straints and social confrontations’’ and the possibility of
contesting dominant medical knowledges (Philo, 2000,
pp. 13–16).
Foucault’s notion of successive body knowledges
shows clearly how spatialised transformations are
transformations of knowledge and of the body through
scientific, medical and institutional practices. It also
shows how these transformations do not necessarily
deny the broader bodily and social contexts, however
much they are changed. Gene mapping does produce a
new spatialisation of the body and health and illness,
and this transformation does produce material changes
in the body, but there are gaps and spaces within which
the organic, interconnected, dynamic body can be
glimpsed.
Deconstructing maps of the genes
The use of the term ‘map’ and the process of
‘mapping’ in the science of genetics demands our
attention as geographers, particularly so because geneti-
cists themselves are drawing on geographical notions of
mapping. Jones (1994, p. 56), likening the process of
genetic ‘discovery’ to the cartographic explorations of
the British Empire, claims that ‘‘Genetics, like geogra-
phy, is about maps; in this case, the inherited map of
ourselves’’ and compares the making of the physical
map of the genome to ‘‘surveying a country with a six-
inch ruler, starting at one end and driving doggedly on
to the opposite frontier’’ (p. 67). The metaphor is
powerful: the genome as a bounded territory and the
gene map as an accurate representation of this territory.
While genetic maps are quite different in format to
orthodox maps of land territory, the usage of mapping
terms, and more importantly the metaphors, by
geneticists and the scientific media, with full knowledge
of the deeply embedded understanding of the purpose of
maps and their central role in society (Dorling and
Fairbairn, 1997), means that as geographers we can and
must treat gene maps and mapping to a rigorous
analysis (something that I can only begin here).
6 I wish to acknowledge Philo’s (2000) excellent analysis of
‘The Birth of the Clinic’ (1973).
E. Hall / Health & Place 9 (2003) 151–161 157
Wood (1993) develops a comprehensive deconstruc-
tion of the purpose and method of maps. He argues that
the traditional understanding of the map as a ‘mirror of
reality’ (Pickles, 1992), or a ‘window on the world’
(Harley, 1988, 1992), is deeply embedded in (Western)
society, an outcome of the role of the map in colonial
expansion and the division and ownership of land
(Massey, 1995; Harvey, 1989). Maps are understood as
‘spatial data handling tools’ (Dorling and Fairbairn,
1997, p. 1), instruments of practical application and, as
such, objective entities representing a knowable and
certain landscape. Wood’s contribution is to disrupt
this, and to recognise the ‘power of maps’: the
representation of what cannot be encompassed in the
field of vision (Harvey, 1989),7 the embodiment of
knowledge in the map, the desires for a particular future
reality, and the socio-cultural-technical context within
which it was made (Haraway, 1997). As Wood states,
‘‘knowledge of the map is knowledge of the world from
which it emerges y an isomorphic counter-image to
everything in society that conspires to produce it’’ (p.
18). Reading maps, then, takes on quite a different
meaning, as route finding is replaced by textual analysis,
‘‘Our task is to search for the social forces that have
structured cartography and to locate the presence of
power—and its effects—in all map knowledge’’ (Harley,
1988, p. 232).
If we accept further, firstly, that maps are ‘totalising
devices’ (de Certeau, 1984), that provide the ability to
imagine the world from outside without having seen it,
to make it stable and certain and knowable (Harvey,
1989) and, secondly, that maps are ‘producers of space’
(Lefebrve, 1974), then gene maps require a quite
different analysis. One of the central arguments of this
paper is that space has to be made, and that once
spatialised an entity is transformed and transformable.
Territorial maps and gene maps are a key instrument in
this transformation. When a map is described as a
‘spatial data handling tool’ it is just that, but in quite a
different sense to that intended by cartographers. The
map is not a mirror of reality, a window on the world,
but is that reality, is that world. The purpose of the gene
map is to imagine the gene, to transform its chemical
materiality into a set of individual objects set within an
overall spatial structure—the chromosome, the cell, and
the body. The maps make sense of the gene, indeed they
make the gene. Gene maps are perhaps the most
important part of the process securing the gene and
genetics as the prime interpretations of the body and
health and illness. The gene map makes the body a
genetic body through the power of perspectivism—gene
maps can see ‘beyond’ the visible and beyond the
possible: ‘‘This is the very point of the map, to present us
not with the world we can see, but to point toward a
world we might know’’ (Wood, 1993, p. 12). A key
process of the gene map, as with the landscape map, in
its making of spatial knowledge and its ordering of the
space, is the transformation of the natural into the
conceptual and in doing so its breaking down into
individual objects, ‘‘To map a river is to bring it into
being—inescapably—the land that it drains; what was
originally whole is suddenly in pieces—water, banks,
slopes, hills—which as they materialise take their places
(if only vis-"a-vis each other)’’ (Rundstrom, 1993, p. 162).
Lefebvre (1974) calls this transformation the ‘pulverisa-
tion’ or fragmentation of the landscape body, the
atomising of the body into separate parts that make
sense in the individualism of the capitalist economy.
Through this transformation, spatialisation and frag-
mentation of the body through gene mapping into a
genetic, atomised body, the power of the body is also
changed (Foucault, 1980), from a whole power to a
fragmented power, opening up the body and the genes to
domination and ownership (Harvey, 1989). The patent-
ing and commodification of genetic information by
pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies is the
first step in this process (Castree, 2001; Spencer and
Whatmore, 2001).
‘Fetishising’ the gene
Haraway (1997) employs the term ‘reification’ to
describe gene mapping in order to capture the conver-
sion of an idea or concept into an object, the process of
materialisation. More specifically, reification ‘‘trans-
mutes material, contingent, human and nonhuman
liveliness into maps of life itself and then mistakes the
map and its reified entities for the bumptious, nonliteral
world’’ (1997, p. 135, emphasis added). She takes the
phrase ‘life itself’ from the writing of Franklin (1993),
who describes how ‘life’ and nature—in its broadest
sense—becomes transformed into particular forms of
materiality and ‘instruments’, i.e. these instruments
become ‘life’ (itself). The gene map is a primary example,
Haraway argues, of this, as it is both tool/instrument
and signifier. It is this transfer of life into map and back
again, this transformation of material biology into
genetic signification and then back again into the body
through the application of the representation, that lies at
the heart of Haraway’s concern.
Further, she describes gene mapping as a ‘‘particular
kind of spatialisation’’ (1997, p. 141), which she refers to
as ‘corporealisation’. She envisages this spatialisation of
the body as being the network of interactions between
human and nonhuman actors operating within the
context of ‘technoscience’ and producing ‘natural-
technical’ material objects of the body, such as cells,
molecules and genes. The gene map is the process that
7Harvey (1989) notes the central importance of ‘perspecti-
vism’, the movement of the eye of the mapper from the ground
in amongst the materiality to an elevated and distant position.
E. Hall / Health & Place 9 (2003) 151–161158
makes this happen, makes it possible, because it draws
together and makes real the concepts of the body and
genetics. Out of this interpretation has emerged a
fixed entity of the gene and, in Haraway’s argument,
it is a gene that is ‘fetishised’, i.e. that is imagined as
possessing power and at the same moment accepted
as simply physical. In the heady rush that is fetishism
the rest of the body, both its bodily materiality and its
social embeddedness, is blanked from the field of
conception.
Conclusion: ‘putting the gene in its place’
An interpretation of gene maps and mapping is just
one possible engagement for geography to make with
the ‘new’ genetics, but it is, this paper has argued, a most
crucial one. Gene maps are the central technical and
conceptual ‘tool’ in the ‘exploration’ of genetic material,
transforming this particular biology of the body into a
structured, ordered and spatialised entity and knowl-
edge. And it is this process of spatialisation that makes
the new genetics knowledge possible and in turn makes
possible the manipulations, both medical and commer-
cial, of the body’s matter.
Within this central argument, the paper has made
three other key points. Firstly, the very process of gene
map production must be (re)interpreted as one of claims,
uncertainties, errors and what the paper termed
‘methodological manoeuvres’, all familiar features in
the field of science (Latour, 1987), but often missed in
the glare of statements of ‘accuracy’ and ‘completeness’.
In addition, the social, economic, technical and political
‘assemblages’ within which gene mapping occurs are
shot through with interests, conflicts, contestations and
indecisions that are marginalised, even obscured, in the
claims of achievement (Hinchliffe, 2001). An effective
‘teasing out’ of these missing narratives is clearly a key
challenge.
Secondly, as Lippman (1992) argues, for gene map-
ping to take place requires more than the availability of
equipment and techniques, it requires the understanding
that such knowledge is there to be gathered. A powerful
sense of a pre-existing ‘natural’ body, its genes and
chromosomes organised as within the bounds of a
library, pervades the process of gene mapping. In their
making gene maps reproduce this conception of the
body and frame the subsequent exploration of genetic
material, and connections to health and illness.
Thirdly, gene maps (inevitably) objectify and privilege
the gene within the body’s biology and its role in the
development of physiological characteristics. But more
than this, the power of the (gene) map is such that this
‘claim’ becomes a conceptual and material ‘truth’
(Haraway, 1997). To maintain this truth other parts of
the body, other internal and external processes and
interactions, are excluded. Foucault (1973) argues that
there was a moment in the development of the
anatomical-clinical model of the body and disease, in
which a more complex, interconnected, organic body,
quite different to the resulting model, was glimpsed.
Glimpses of the whole body in the genocentric present
are rare, but must be sought.
What then is an alternative narrative, an alternative
spatialisation of the biological materiality of the body
and the place of the gene within this? Lippman (1992)
argues that a thorough critique of the ‘‘assumptions,
rationales and practices [is needed] to put [gene]
mapping into context with analyses that take other than
a reductionist standpoint’’ (p. 1474). Further, she
contends, ‘‘what if we gave primary importance to
relationships rather than to components, if we saw
connections, not codes?yWould current gene mapping
and sequencing activities still be a major approach to
health?’’ (Lippman, 1992). Importantly, it is from within
genetics and biology that such reimaginings of the body
are emerging (Rothman, 1995). Bickmore (1998) stresses
the importance of the spatial context of the chromosome
and the cell for gene operation and, further, the dynamic
nature of gene organisation and process. Rose (1997)
places the organism, rather than the gene, at the centre
of our experiences of development and health and
illness. He recognises the role of genes ‘‘without
subscribing to genetic determinism’’ and attempts to
reimagine the body as a three-dimensional structure that
is a ‘‘product of the constant dialectic between the
biological and the social’’ (pp. 6–7). Lewontin (2000)
echoes this, arguing that DNA’s role as ‘information
bearer’ is ‘‘subtly transmogrified into DNA as blueprint,
as master molecule’’ (p. 143) by fetishisation of the gene.
This critique is extended by Fox Keller (1994), who
argues that a gene can only function as part of biological
system and, further, that organisms have biological
mechanisms that in fact regulate gene ‘activity’. We are,
perhaps, the products of ‘‘turbulent genomes in turbu-
lent environments’’ (Dover, 2001, p. 64), ‘‘continually
constructing our own futures, albeit in circumstances
not of our own choosing’’ (Rose, 1997, p. 7). From
within the science that produces gene maps we can spot
glimpses of an organic, socially embedded body.
Gene mapping is a technical, political, and commer-
cial process that at the same moment makes the body a
genocentric space and connects that space into medical,
pharmaceutical and cultural discourses (Braun and
Castree, 1998). The reimagining of the body and health
through the gene has serious conceptual and material
consequences (Rose, 1998), as resources and technolo-
gies are injected into diagnosis and treatment of disease
and into our futures (Collins and McKusick, 2001).
Such is the dominance of these discourses in health (and
many other areas) that sites of contestation, wherever
they appear, that must be engaged with.
E. Hall / Health & Place 9 (2003) 151–161 159
Acknowledgements
Particular thanks to Chris Philo for ideas, advice and
support, and to Wendy Bickmore for enlightening
conversation. I would also like to thank Jamie Pearce
for co-ordinating this special issue, and the two referees
for their invaluable comments.
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