  The gene is a “cultural icon”: in popular culture, from movies to cartoons to Dear Abby, quite apart from its biological and medical contexts, the gene has become “a symbol, a metaphor, a convenient way to define personhood, identity, and relationships in socially meaningful ways” (Nelkin and Lindee 1995, p. 16). Hardly a week goes by when we do not hear about a newly discovered gene for one thing or another. “Geneticization” is a term used to describe this phenomenon marked by an increasing tendency to reduce human differences to genetic ones (Lippman  1991).[29] This tendency is accompanied by worries of critics that embracing a reductionist approach to medicine that conceives of human health and disease in wholly molecular or genetic terms individualizes these and detracts attention from our shared social and physical environments and the role of toxins, fast food, poverty, lack of access to health care, etc. (Nelkin and Tancredi 1989; Hubbard and Wald 1993). One of the justifications for spending several billion dollars on human genome research is the belief that genes are key determinants of not only rare Mendelian diseases like Huntington's disease or cystic fibrosis but common multi-factorial conditions like cancer, depression, and heart disease. In Watson's words: “Some call New Jersey the Cancer State because of all the chemical companies there, but in fact, the major factor is probably your genetic constitution” (in Cooper 1994, p. 326). 