  There are related worries that the human genome reference sequence will arbitrate a standard of genetic normality; for example, the application of concepts like “genetic error” and “damage” to the genome institutes a call for correction or repair (Limoges 1994; also Murphy 1994). McKusick (1989) has defended the HGP's approach as “consistent with that of most biological research which depends on a few, and even on single individuals, to represent the whole, and with the fact, recognized by geneticists, that there is no single normal, ideal, or perfect genome” (p. 913). However, the normal-abnormal distinction is fundamental to the structure-function studies of proximate fields of biology like physiology and molecular genetics, and while McKusick is no doubt correct to say that geneticists accept that there is no single normal, ideal, or perfect genome, this does not mean that individual DNA sequences are not constituted as normal or abnormal based on their functional significance or that entire genomes are not deemed to fall inside or outside of an acceptable range. Indeed, the 1988 OTA report on the HGP recommends the “eugenic use of genetic information … to ensure … that each individual has at least a modicum of normal genes” (p. 85). It is little wonder that many worry that as an increasing number of mutations are identified and tested for, the range of what is considered normal may narrow, with diminished tolerance for those people who lie outside this range. And there can be no reassurance that judgments of health and disease, normality and abnormality, manage to escape normativity by being transported to the level of the genome; instead, they carry with them any social values and cultural biases that are implicated at the higher level. Says critic Ruth Hubbard (in Holloway 1995, p. 50): “I have gone out on a limb by saying that most people in our culture are very judgmental about women who terminate a pregnancy because of sex. How different is that from terminating a pregnancy because of Down syndrome?”