The concepts of heredity and the unit of inheritance have evolved to greater complexity after a century of scientific development. Immediately before the turn of the last century, the history of science saw the rise and fall of the central dogma, which explains the coding and synthesis of proteins in a unidirectional manner and emphasizes the dominance of genes in this hierarchy. In the last decade of the century, -omics emerged to reveal the interactions among DNA, RNA, and proteins. These interactions have been proven to be more complicated than gene centralism had assumed. This shift resulted in the unprecedented large-scale project of decoding the human genome (1990-2003), once considered promising for deciphering the roles of heredity in health and diseases. However, the outcome was that the complexity of both the problems and the ways of seeking solutions has only increased. These rapid and radical shifts of scientific practices have not necessarily been paralleled by insights into the social, cultural, and ethical concerns in response to this paradigm shift. Meanwhile, the fields ofscience and technology studies and STS have yet to reconsider related issues in both global and local contexts as well as the continuity and discontinuity between them.
