In today’s world, responsible biocitizenship has become a new way of belonging in society. Individuals are expected to make “responsible” medical choices, including the decision to be screened for genetic disease. Paradoxically, we have even come to see ourselves as having the right to be responsible vis-à-vis the proactive mitigation of genetic risk. At the same time, the concept of genetic disease has become a new and powerful way of defining the boundaries between human groups. Tay-Sachs, an autosomal recessive disorder, is a case in point—with origins in the period of Eastern European Jewish immigration to the United States and United Kingdom that spanned the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it has a long and fraught history as a marker of Jewish racial difference. In Testing Fate, Shelley Z. Reuter asks: Can the biocitizen, especially one historically defined as a racialized and pathologized Other, be said to be exercising authentic, free choice in deciding whether to undertake genetic screening? Drawing on a range of historical and contemporary examples—doctors’ medical reports of Tay-Sachs since the first case was documented in 1881, the medical field’s construction of Tay-Sachs as a disease of Jewish immigrants, YouTube videos of children with Tay-Sachs that frame the disease as tragic disability avoidable through a simple genetic test, and medical malpractice suits since the test for the disease became available—Reuter shows that true agency in genetic decision-making can be exercised only from a place of cultural inclusion. Choice in this context is in fact a kind of unfreedom—a moral duty to act that is not really agency at all.

In the fifty years since DNA was discovered, we have seen extraordinary advances. For example, genetic testing has rapidly improved the diagnosis and treatment of diseases such as Huntington's, cystic fibrosis, breast cancer, and Alzheimer's. But with this new knowledge comes difficult decisions for countless people, who wrestle with fear about whether to get tested, and if so, what to do with the results. Am I My Genes? shows how real individuals have confronted these issues in their daily lives. Robert L. Klitzman interviewed 64 people who faced Huntington's Disease, breast and ovarian cancer, or Alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency. The book describes--often in the person's own words--how each has wrestled with the vast implications that genetics has for their lives and their families. Klitzman shows how these men and women struggle to make sense of their predicament and its causes. They confront a series of quandaries--whether to be tested; whether to disclose their genetic risks to parents, siblings, spouses, offspring, friends, doctors, insurers, employers, and schools; how to view and understand themselves and their genetics; what treatments, if any, to pursue; whether to have children, adopt, screen embryos, or abort; and whether to participate in genetic communities. In the face of these uncertainties, they have tried to understand these tests and probabilities, avoid fatalism, anxiety, despair, and discrimination, and find hope, meaning, and a sense of wholeness. Forced to wander through a wilderness of shifting sands, they chart paths that many others may eventually follow. Klitzman captures here the voices of pioneers, some of the first to encounter the personal dilemmas introduced by modern genetics. Am I My Genes? is an invaluable account of their experience, one that will become all the more common in the coming years. "An extraordinary exploration...probing the many roles and implications of genetics in our lives today.... Filled with astonishing insights, this riveting book is vital reading for us all." --Paula Zahn "Klitzman lucidly discusses the moral and psychological complexities that come in the wake of genetic testing.... An important book for anyone who has the genes for pathology, which is all of us, and I recommend it highly." --Kay Redfield Jamison, author of An Unquiet Mind "An illuminating voyage through the medical, familial and existential quandaries faced by those of us at genetic risk." --Thomas H. Murray, President and CEO, The Hastings Center

The latest volume in the series on aquatic toxicology reflects the increasing emphasis on the development of new techniques to examine the molecular and cellular effects of toxicants. The 25 papers provide information on sediment toxicity and bioavailability, comparative toxicity and mechanisms, sub