Introduction

Abstract

In 2007, a daily newspaper in Salvador in the state of Bahia, Brazil, published a wonderfully creative image by the Brazilian artist and cartoonist Cau Gomez.1 Simultaneously, it evokes and references the well-known drawing by the Renaissance artist Leonardo de Vincis Vitruvian man and the debates about race and genomics that have become frequent in Brazil and other South American countries in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Like other countries of the world, new technological developments in the field of genomics have provoked intense debates about the historical formation of the Brazilian society and the construction of its national identity. As the chapters in this book demonstrate, such debates have crossed the boundaries of the laboratory in various national and transnational contexts in South America and are intersecting with and being informed by public discourse and political practice with diverse consequences.