Mapping the human genome and other genetic research raises possibilities that challenge deeply held religious and cultural values. As such, research creates more than technical, scientific problems in which more knowledge might bring about the modernist dream of unending progress and human well-being. With few notable exceptions, however, the race to map the entire human genome rarely comes under scrutiny. Broad concerns raised by theologians, for example, tend to be translated into technical language or shelved altogether as untimely or too vague. One would seem a Luddite to question this costly endeavor, with its long range promise to eradicate disease and other forms of human suffering.

In her book, Genetic Maps and Human Imagination, sociologist Barbara Katz Rothman takes that risk to open a discussion of the limits and the troubling implications of the genetic mapping enterprise. Sure she would like to see diseases that make babies die in anguish disappear, but she would also like to see children thrive by the application of simpler strategies—good prenatal and early childhood care, safe and clean neighborhoods, the possibilities for love and nurturing relationships. If our concern, she asks, is with preventing disability and disease, with extending the life span, with lowering infant mortality, with making smarter people, aren't there are better places to spend money? Her questions touch upon race, cancer, and other large, complex problems. What do we really know when we learn about specific genes such as BRCA1? What does it mean when we see the essence of life located in a tiny bit of DNA? She asks not how we are to predict sexual orientation but why we would want to know this.

"Genetics," Rothman writes "is the most comprehensive theory since God." Yet, the language we most often use to describe the problems in genetics is technical, not religious or even ethical. She notes, from the work of sociologist John Evans, that a kind of moral Esperanto has come to dominate thinking about genetics. Theologians, who participate in national bioethics conclaves, speak their own language—about "playing God" and controlling parts of life nobody has any business controlling. By the time the translation is complete, however, the language of theology is lost. The thinking, she suggests, goes something like this: a theologian asks if producing genetically engineered bacteria amounts to creation of a new life form, isn't that "playing God"? The scientist's response is "If playing God is taking risks, put more filters on the lab hoods and then you're not playing God." The Esperantists have the power to define the rules by which questions are interpreted and addressed; absolute moral concerns, as some theologians frame issues, have no place in scientific thinking or even, it would seem, in ethical thinking. What-ifs are irrelevant to the basic question of potential practices; once something is done, then we can evaluate the consequences of its application.

Rothman questions not the search for specific genes, but the mapping enterprise itself, wherein genetic thinking locates the "soul". DNA becomes "the core of the self and the essence of relatedness," she writes. How will genetic mapping change us and how we think of ourselves? What will it do to our self-understanding, our notions of meaning and purpose? These questions must come before we spend untold dollars on the genetic enterprise and not at the expense of resolving problems that far fewer resources could immediately address.