Abby Lippman’s geneticization thesis, of the early 1990s, argued and anticipated that with
the rise of genetics, increasing areas of social and health related activities would come to be
understood and defined in genetic terms leading to major changes in society, medicine and
health care. We review the considerable literature on geneticization and consider how the
concept stands both theoretically and empirically across scientific, clinical, popular and lay
discourse and practice. Social science scholarship indicates that relatively little of the original
claim of the geneticization thesis has been realised, highlighting the development of more
complex and dynamic accounts of disease in scientific discourse and the complexity of
relationships between bioscientific, clinical and lay understandings. This scholarship
represents a shift in social science understandings of the processes of sociotechnical change,
which have moved from rather simplistic linear models to an appreciation of disease
categories as multiply understood. Despite these shifts, we argue that a genetic imaginary
persists, which plays a performative role in driving investments in new gene-based
developments. Understanding the enduring power of this genetic imaginary and its
consequences remains a key task for the social sciences, one which treats ongoing genetic
expectations and predictions in a sceptical yet open way
