I wrote "Reckless Driving" following an interview I conducted with a chief science officer at a biotech firm in southern California at the end of 1999. This interview was one of the last of over 50 interviews I conducted with scientists, policy makers and activists engaged in debates surrounding the re-emergence of large-scale efforts to characterize human diversity at the genetic level during the 1990s.¹ The interview took place just as the consensus view about race and biology was about to shift. In the mid-to-late 1990s, scientists publicly claimed, and prominent newspapers reported, that "biologically speaking there was no such thing as race."² This view corresponded with the received view in much social science and historical research. As "Reckless" notes, historians of race pronounced race a 19th century concept that fell out of use in biology by the mid-20th century. "Reckless" is an effort to communicate that what was happening on the ground was far more complicated: not only had scientists not given up on race, it was a central tool in their efforts to find medically important genetic differences. It also sought to explore the reasons for and effects of the dissonance between the widespread claim that 'race' had no meaning in biology, and the in practice use of racial categories. The piece began as a written text, but I had always imagined the piece as a spoken word with images flashing in the background. To create these images, I collaborated with the visual artist Angela Moore. Our collaboration consisted of Angela reading my other writing on race and biology, while I simultaneously explored images that Angela had collected from popular media sources. We also spent an afternoon walking through and taking photos in the back streets of biotech Boston (specifically, Cambridgeport), exploring the iconography of biotechnopark America. We spent another afternoon in used bookstores, exploring images from old biology texts, as one of the themes I wanted to develop in "Reckless" was the thin line between history and the present in the area of race and biology. Creating and selecting images for the text proved one of the most difficult aspects of creating this piece. I sought images that would help viewers make links between the supposedly distinct realms of 'science' and 'society.' Such images are challenging to craft in a world where the divide between science and society remains sedimented in how contemporary worlds are thought and imagined. However, the selection and creation of these images and their ordering in relation to the text provides a rich platform for exploring some of the questions that I explore in other work at different sensory levels than those of formal academic texts. I performed "Reckless" for many years as a spoken word piece, with slides of the images flashing in the background. I first performed it at the annual meeting of the Social Studies of Science in 2000. I later performed it in classes. I found it to be a particularly useful tool in teaching, as it brought the issues of race and genomics alive for students in a way that I found more traditional scholarly articles did not. I also found that far from fading in salience, the issues in "Reckless" only increased in importance. As a result, I decided to try and publish the piece. I explicitly wanted an interactive web format that might retain some of the pieces original aesthetic experience. The journal darkmatter provided me with the opportunity to create this experience. They first published the piece in their Race/Matter issue in February of 2008. With their permission, I then worked with the web designer Suzi Grishpul to develop it into its final form now accessible both through the darkmatter website, and my UCSC Science and Justice Working group page.

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¹This research led to the writing of my book, Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics.
²For a longer discussion of this point, see Reardon, J. (2008). Race Without Salvation: Beyond the Science/Society Divide in Genomic Studies of Human Diversity. Revisiting Race in A Genomic Age. Edited by Barbara Koenig, Sandra Soo-jin Lee, and Sarah Richardson. New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press.