{"doi":"10.12929/jls.14.1-2","title":"Introduction: Problem-Based Collaboration","abstract":"The articles in this double special issue of the Journal of Literature and Science address the topic of genetic privacy in literature, film, and TV, from the early decades of the twentieth century, when the eugenics movement was just becoming aware of genetics, to the twenty-first century, when clones, chimeras, and gene-editing are as common at the multiplex as in the laboratory.Genetic privacy is a matter of increasing concern in today's society.High profile events such as the capture of the Golden State Killer have dramatized how publicly accessible genetic information can be used by law enforcement to track suspects.Some commentators worry that genetic information could lead to discrimination in health insurance or employment; stigmatize people with genetic conditions; reinforce ethnic, racial, sexual, and gender bias; lead to new forms of eugenics; or be used by governments to infringe on individual and collective rights.The eight articles about genetic privacy in this issue are the fruits of a unique collaboration.Supported by a multi-year grant from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the authors worked together with other researchers at Vanderbilt University from genetics, bioinformatics, bioethics, law, and the social sciences to explore a shared set of questions: What risks do the creation of large biobanks of genetic information pose to individual privacy?How are communities affected by the disclosure of genetic data about their members, whether intentionally by consumers who use direct-toconsumer genetic testing services (DTC-GT) or unintentionally, through breaches of data security?What protections -through laws, institutional practices, passwords, and anonymization -exist to protect our genetic data, and how effective are those protections?Finally, how do literature, film, TV, and social media affect people's attitudes toward genetic privacy?Our group, the Culture Team, was charged with exploring this last question.Our first step was to assemble the most comprehensive dataset of films and television episodes with genetics content ever collected (775 unique items, dating from 1912-2020, coded for 109 different attributes).Our method of collecting and coding these texts and our analysis of the data from the perspectives of genre, medium, and time period are detailed in the first article in this issue (Gibbons, Stovall, and Clayton).Other publications from the team, in this issue and elsewhere, have focused on genetic privacy in literature and social media.All our work, regardless of its subject matter, has benefitted from this dataset in varying degrees.The key to making this transdisciplinary collaboration successful has been our focus on a single, urgent problem.Problem-based research differs from traditional approaches to literary criticism, in which the scholar generally lets the text itself, in dialogue with current issues in the field, shape the course of analysis.Allowing a shared problem to set the terms of our investigations makes us vulnerable to the charge that we are not reading the literary work for its own sake but rather instrumentalizing the text.This risk, however, seems worth hazarding for the chance to demonstrate the value of literature and the arts -as well as the humanities methods we bring to their studyfor speaking to urgent social issues and contributing to policy recommendations meant to solve those issues.The nascent movement to establish Humanities Labs at U.S. universities to foster collaborative initiatives is making the concept of problem-based research more familiar.","journal":"The Journal of Literature and 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Clayton","orcid":"0000-0002-3569-4853","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":0,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:55:12.400773Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}