Social psychiatry and the human genome : contextualising heritability * LEON EISENBERG

one of the great intellectual achievements of 20th century biological science: deciphering of the DNA code by Jim Watson and Francis Crick (Watson & Crick, 1953). It is also the month and year in which The National Human Genome Research Institute announced completing the human genome (Collins et al, 2003). Is this the time to hold a memorial mass to bury social psychiatry, an outmoded corpus of work, charming in its day but overtaken by the relentless pace of scientific advance? Genetics as destiny has become a commonplace of public discourse. Garrison Keillor, an American humorist, has described an extended Norwegian kinship assembling for its traditional Thanksgiving dinner: ‘After a half hour in the living room, all possible topics of conversation having been exhausted, we sat there eyeing each other in silence, hoping against hope that genetics isn’t everything!’