This is a dynamic book that successfully combines global and local thinking with regard to an
emerging technology that will contribute to the expansion of proteomics and pharmacogenomics
the science of tailored healthcare and treatments. Genetic testing and screening will change
the way people understand health diagnostic knowledge illness but also crime databases and
private information paternity and self-knowledge. In addition to giving individuals the
opportunity to think differently about their well-being it installs a new taxonomy in terms of
illness because its probabilistic effects will introduce a new narrative in the health
discourse of 21st century society. While in the past people could be classified as being
healthy or sick now through genetic testing and screening adults can be classified as being
healthy predisposed to an illness probably at risk at risk or carriers of certain risks.
The effects of this taxonomy do not remain confined to the individual who is tested but extends
to an entire family as genetic knowledge is family knowledge. But the technology of genetic
testing and screening installs a second dramatic register in the prenatal phase when cells and
embryos are tested and subsequently altered in order to hit targets of perfection. However
this technology can also be seen as a strategy for the acquisition of new knowledge about
oneself as it instigates a different attitude towards ourselves in a scenario in which the
notion of life as a singular noun is seriously questioned by cultural practices that make it
necessary to speak of forms of life. The complexity of the Self resulting from this
epistemological shift evoke the ancient Greco-roman practices of the care of the self leading
to self-knowledge. Genetic testing and screening could therefore be understood as a form of
self-quest and attempt to discover what we are beyond our wishes and desires - beyond what we
would like to be.
