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Genetic Maps and Human Imaginations: The Limits of Science in Understanding Who We Are by Barbara Katz Rothman, W. W. Norton, £17.95, ISBN 0393047032

THERE are some awkward questions that most of us never get round to asking. Who, for example, wants to appear naive by asking what exactly we are doing all this human genome mapping for? A map is a guide: it tells you what is there, says Barbara Katz Rothman, a sociologist at City University in New York. But it also tells you how to go places. Will this map take us where we want to go? And where exactly is that anyway? What, after all, is the meaning of life?

“Why are we spending our precious dollars on this map?” she asks. “What are we looking for? If our concern is with preventing disability and disease, with extending the life span, with lowering infant mortality, with making smarter people, there are better places to spend money . . . They want to find the genetic contribution to intelligence? Appreciate each baby with wonder and awe at its developing mind, nurture than intelligence in a rich and stimulating and safe environment, offer schools that inspire as well as instruct, and then get back to me on the question of individual-or racial-variation in intellectual potential,” Katz Rothman argues. “Don’t start with schools that warehouse kids, televisions that stupefy them, and parents who are overburdened and overstressed, and then look for the genes for intelligence.”

Genetic Maps and Human Imaginations may sound like another anti-science rant, but it’s really something else: an entertaining and highly personal overview of the potentially devastating social consequences of the new genetics. For Katz Rothman, the long-standing relationship between science and racism is a major concern. So she asks: is this a good historical moment to look for genes linked to particular ethnic groups? Researchers say it will shed fascinating light on human history, but in a racist world aren’t other considerations more pressing?

“It reminds me of the light bulb joke,” she says. “`How many New Yorkers does it take to change a light bulb?’ The answer, I can tell you as a good New Yorker, is: `Who wants to know?’ Who wants to know, and why, are the important questions to ask here . . . who will use this research, who will draw upon it, and for what purposes?”

Resist the temptation to go limp in the face of scientific know-how, says Katz Rothman, else “we’ll be carried off to places we might very well choose not to go”.