Illusions of controlling the future: Risk and genetic inheritance.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the implications of current beliefs that human beings can control the risk of inheriting a genetic disease and influence their present and future health. To accomplish this goal, materials will be drawn from disparate literatures bearing on concepts of probability, risk and genetic inheritance, and on empirical data gathered on cancer survivors and healthy persons with a family history of cancer. The concept of risk has been theorised on a grand scale but, as Lupton (1999, Introduction, Risk and Sociological Theory , Cambridge University Press) correctly observes, there has been very little empirical work done on how people experience risk as part of their lived world. In this paper, notions of probabilities and risk will be examined as applied to beliefs in genetic inheritance that are shaped by historical and cultural forces and in turn how they shape people's lives. It will be proposed that the belief that knowledge of one's genetic inheritance can control one's future health and disease is an illusion, and also replicates in part a religious notion of predestination.