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Our presentation is based on the philosophy of biology and medicine. It aims to put into perspective the new individual that emerges from modern genetic advances: genomic medicine with biobanks and databases, bioinformatics platforms and molecular boards, genetic tests. We explain how contemporary insights into genomics foster the emergence of a new individual; a “biological or genetic citizen”, acting as a decision-making agent in the technical environment that shapes him, to the point that “the human material of himself is not necessarily the human enslaved to himself.” (Michaud) This emergence reflects the radical influence of this new symbol, DNA, both from a medical and hereditary perspective. In this first medical framework, we demonstrate the inclusion of a third term between the normal and the pathological: susceptibility. It refers to the temporality during which predictive medicine intervenes to calculate the probability of the protodisease’s development, making the patient a pre-patient. Here, it is not the genetic disease that is treated but the statistical risk of its onset. Secondly, we show how susceptibility impacts the hereditary paradigm, by introducing the individual “genetically at risk”. This subject is part of a heredity process where the knowledge of genetic defects leads to a genetic responsibility that affects the very notion of family descent. As a result, this biological citizen is part of a new form of “vital politics”, which re-explores Foucault's sanitary-related biopolitics in the light of genetic advances. This new paradigm sets up an unprecedented consumerism, where the emerging subject consumes both the knowledge of his or her own genome and his or her influence over it.

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Jessica Lombard 1919
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