# Abstract This paper considers the implications of the rise of the new molecular genetics for the ways in which we are governed and the ways in which we govern ourselves. Using examples of genetic screening and genetic discrimination in education, employment and insurance, and a case study of debates among those at risk of developing Huntington’s Disease and their relatives, we suggest that some of the claims made by critics of these new developments are misplaced. ==While there are possibilities of genetic discrimination, the key event is the creation of the person ‘genetically at risk’==. But genetic risk does not imply resignation in the face of an implacable biological destiny: it induces new and active relations to oneself and one’s future. In particular, it generates new forms of ‘[[genetic responsibility’]], locating actually and potentially affected individuals within new communities of obligation and identification. Far from generating fatalism, the rewriting of personhood at a genetic level and its visualization through a ‘molecular optic’ transforms the relations between patient and expert in unexpected ways, and is linked to the development of novel ‘life strategies’, involving practices of choice, enterprise, self-actualization and prudence in relation to one’s genetic make-up. Most generally, we suggest, ==the birth of the person ‘genetically at risk’ is part of a wider reshaping of personhood along somatic lines and a mutation in conceptions of life itself==. # [[genetic responsibility]] “The language of genetic risk increasingly provides a grid of perception which informs decisions on how to conduct one’s life, have children, get married or pursue a career. With the emergence of the genetically at risk person, genes themselves have been constituted as what [[Foucault]] (1982) might term an ‘ethical substance’ that one works upon in relation to the self (genetic identity, reproduction, health) and in relation to others (siblings, kin, marriage, children).” (Novas and Rose, p. 502) > Rather than seeing these practices of genetic subjectication in isolation, we suggest that they intersect with, and become allied to, contemporary norms of selfhood that stress autonomy, self-actualization, prudence, responsibility and choice. # Conclusions