Predicting the future of an unborn child—its sex, its health, its defects—is hardly a purely technical intervention. Matter-of-fact technologies of predictive genetic testing (PGT) may narrow down the individual or culturally specific speculation about the future. Yet they cannot completely extinguish the complexities of culture. Neither may scientific facts, relying on the role of innovative scientists themselves, replace the political decision-making processes on various societal levels. PGT is changing occupational practices, patient behavior, and relations broadly in health care. It is also changing how laymen, as well as experts, think about their future lives and about those of their family members, or about fellow citizens affected by policies one has to take responsibility for. This edited volume illustrates methodologies of STS in Asia from several vantage points in regard to decision making: how various interest groups and less influential individuals in society estimate and react to the prognosticated future. The great strength of it is ethnographic fieldwork—in Japan, in Sri Lanka, in India, and in China—and that its authors take the numerous questions, long debated according to Euro-North-American-centric paradigms, to Asia. Expectations of new ethnographic findings from Asia might lead curious readers to first ideas of a book rather different from this volume under its title Frameworks of Choice: Predictive and Genetic Testing in Asia. The collection of articles edited by the social scientist Margaret Sleeboom- Faulkner takes up broad (yet Eurocentric) debates about the ethics of health care and science and discusses specific applications of genetics: tests estimating the probability of severe future illnesses such as sickle-cell anemia or cancer, or prognosticating facts that are less clearly identifiable as positive or negative, such as a disability or just the sex of one's future child.
