Encountering genes: Postwar genetic counselling in the UK and Ireland (360G-Wellcome-212648_Z_18_Z)

The proposed project uses genetic counselling as a focused vantage point for understanding how genetics has been communicated, experienced and given meaning. Genetic counsellors are medical professionals who, today, help parents and patients interpret the results of genetic tests and make decisions about treatment and reproduction. Counselling encounters involve highly technical information about risk, are potentially highly emotional, and can powerfully impact intimate practices of family life, medical treatment and lifestyle. Genetic counselling has a seven-decade history in the UK and Ireland—countries that are especially important for their exceptional politics of healthcare, and the range of international collaborations forged by genetic practitioners. In tracing this history, the project has five aims: to chart the making of genetic counselling within the NHS; to produce a sustained history of the genetic counselling encounter; to examine how the profession accommodated and shaped practitioner and patient identities; to trace how efforts to contest genetic medicine changed ethical standards; to explore how genomics is refashioning counselling roles and practices. This will be the first sustained study of emotion in the history of genetic medicine, the first in-depth social history of genetic medicine in the postwar UK and Ireland.