| Summary: | Genetic counselors in the US assess disease risks by drawing on family histories, genetic tests, and patients' racial, ethnic, national, or religious self-identifications. The bodily risks of kinship articulated by family histories can be defused by genetic tests that highlight the contingency of biological inheritance and decouple kinship from genetics. However, such tests, as well as self-identifying patients, also entwine genetic risk with older indicators of kinship: biologically understood race and ethnicity. Across these scales, counselors calculate relative risks to the future health of individuals, in the process measuring kinship as genealogical closeness, genetic dis/similarity, and biocultural race and ethnicity. As counselors personalize the universal promises of genomics at a biomedical nexus of risk and prophylaxis, they tap into anxieties about the changed natures of American kinship.
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