Most of the history of science is the history of successful science, a chronicling of undertakings which we herald as advances. Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics, Jenny Reardon's recent book on the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP), is not that. Race to the Finish provides a lively and fascinating narrative that follows the many controversies which dogged HGDP organizers and ultimately derailed their plans to reconstruct human evolutionary history by way of the worldwide sampling of the DNA of indigenous peoples.

The first half of the book situates current controversies about race and science within the history of twentieth-century biology. Chapter 2 considers the scientific controversy surrounding the 1950 and 1952 Unesco Statements on Race, the typological-population distinction introduced in 1950 by Theodosius Dobzhansky, and Frank Livingstone's 1962 clinical challenge to an ontology of populations. Chapter 3 demonstrates the ways in which the aims of the HGDP were – contrary to reputation – continuous with neo-Darwinian approaches to the study of race formation. Here Reardon challenges the idea that, in her words, ‘population genetics demonstrated the biological meaninglessness of socially meaningful racial categories’ (p. 8). She thus departs from the prevalent view that the Unesco statements marked the beginning of the decline of race as a biological category and its transformation into a sociological one (a view which in the history of science is indebted to George Stocking, Nancy Stepan and Elazar Barkan). According to Reardon, historians' separation of acceptably scientific approaches from those that are unacceptably ideological relies on the typological-population distinction and five related dichotomies: race/population, race/culture, classificatory/empirical, history/natural selection and phenotypic/genotypic. She argues that science and ideology cannot be so readily disentangled, because every one of these dichotomies remained contested post-1950. For example, although Dobzhansky criticized physical anthropologists for basing racial taxonomies on ideal types, he was in turn criticized as being typological by Livingstone, who drew attention to clines and discordant traits as posing problems for the natural classification system and the population-genetic concept of race that Dobzhansky favoured.

The second half of Race to the Finish moves away from the history of science to follow HGDP organizers in their often unsuccessful attempts to respond to various critics. Chapter 4 concerns criticisms of the HGDP arising from within anthropology. Physical and biological anthropologists – like geneticists, experts in the study of human diversity and evolution – protested their exclusion from initial plans for the HGDP. Geneticist organizers responded by welcoming anthropologists' participation in the project, but their integration of this additional expertise faced obstacles, as anthropologists resisted being relegated to an assistant role in extracting DNA samples from indigenous groups of interest. In Chapters 5 and 6 we find different criticisms arising within indigenous and African-American communities. Against the promoters of the HGDP, African-American geneticists and biological anthropologists contended that the focus on indigenous populations would not, given the great genetic diversity of African populations, compensate for the eurocentric bias of the Human Genome Project (HGP). Indigenous-rights activists, meanwhile, were outraged by the project's stated aim of preserving the DNA of culturally threatened groups before they disappeared as distinct peoples, and questioned the commercial motives of HGDP scientists. Responding to these diverse criticisms, project organizers made matters worse by seeking to manage problems instrumentally, when what was needed was more fundamental rethinking of the project. For example, ethical provision was made to recognize community as well as individual autonomy by adding a requirement for group consent, but organizers' assumption that anthropologist experts would identify those culturally defined groups from which it made sense to seek consent ignored the sovereign right of tribes to determine their own membership.

Dusty boxes in archives are not much help for the history of recent science, and Reardon adopts an appropriate range of alternative methods: ethnographic fieldwork at university labs, American Indian reservations, non-governmental organizations, government agencies and scientific meetings; historical investigation of the project's internal documents and materials relevant to post-Second World War debates about genetics and race; and sociological surveys of Internet exchanges among project organizers and members of indigenous groups. Reardon's background as a politically engaged scholar who followed an undergraduate degree in biology with graduate study in the history of science and then science and technology studies (STS) enables her to move easily between these multiple sites and to weave a surprising and seamless narrative.

Foucault's critique of modern regimes of power/knowledge contributes to Reardon's discussion of interactions between HGDP organizers and indigenous critics, especially organizers' seemingly naive conviction that the pursuit of scientific knowledge is invariably a good. For the most part, however, the theory informing the analysis in Race to the Finish lies squarely within STS, most notably incorporating recent work on ‘coproduction’. Coproduction is the view that, in the pursuit of scientific knowledge, the natural order and social and political orders alike are not given but produced. Reardon's thesis is that the HGDP was ultimately unsuccessful because project organizers failed to coproduce complementary realms of nature and society that would support the scientific investigation of the ‘new object’ of human genome diversity. The outcome might have been better had organizers realized they needed to produce, not simply enlist, anthropological expertise, or had they been willing to relinquish the science–ethics dichotomy to produce groups that could be consenting subjects as well as objects of research. Coproduction helpfully takes debates about race beyond the realist–social constructionist divide, and, as Reardon says, brings into ‘focus the intertwined epistemic and political contexts in which biological science is now asked to operate’ (p. 159). (There are other approaches: my own work adopts a pragmatic framework to accomplish similar ends.) To reassure coproduction-wary readers, I hasten to add that Reardon's theoretical interests in putting coproduction to work in Race to the Finish seldom get in the way of the telling of a good story. Indeed, I suspect that coproduction's embrace of process and contingency helps to make this the good story it is.