As many other speakers at today's centenary have made perfectly clear, Margaret Mead, in all her controversy, common sense and commitment to an optimistic belief in the uses of scientific knowledge for social engineering, was a pre-eminent public intellectual of her day. Along with her friend and mentor, Ruth Benedict, she popularized the ideas of a culturally relativizing anthropology, making them widely accessible beyond the Academy. Indeed, her indefatigable curiosity, energy and willingness to take on just about any issue she considered to lie at the intersection of science and public policy gleaned her recognition as "Mother of the World," in Time Magazine's words, and, later, "Grandmother to the Nation," as many have pointed out.

With a nod to my own research biography, I'd like to illustrate both Margaret Mead's presence and its necessary transformation in the work of feminist scholars on reproduction, reproductive technologies and their increasing intersection with disability consciousness. Mead's insistence on the plasticity of the life cycle and the cultural context within which sexuality, marriage and reproduction are structured, and, in turn, structure individual and group experiences, was the foundation on which much of early feminist anthropology was built. But, believing, along with most of her intellectual generation, in the inherent positive value and neutrality of science, Mead's work ignored the structured power dynamics which made reproduction such a culturally volatile topic. "Power" analyses that take a larger, more global framework into account have become quite conventional in the contemporary practices of anthropologists. We often etch our current ethnographies in the bright light shed by post-colonial critiques of how scientific and literary representations of subject people impacted on their governance; or, how Cold War funding (subtly and sometimes not so subtly) shaped the research questions anthropologists were likely to ask.

Much more could have been and has been said about the rise of power sensitivity in contemporary anthropology, on many fronts, but, for purposes of discussion, I'll briefly mention two arenas untouched by Mead's work but central to our own. First, we now need to account for the power relations of reproduction itself. The "politics of reproduction" are exquisitely stratified, not only between women, men and their communities - including legal and religious institutions - but also, of course, across lines of class, racial/ethnic divides and as an aspect of global, international, political economy and culture. Second, many of us are now attentive to the power relations that structure the production, distribution and consumption of scientific knowledge. At stake is financing prestige, worldview and cultural control of the ethos of Western rationality. Science itself has come under scrutiny as a powerful force in and of social life. It would be anachronistic to hold Margaret Mead accountable for not seeing these complex relations, especially as they reside in the discourses and practices of science. Nonetheless, others of her generation were surely more attentive to the dynamics of power, even as they shared her commitment to a more absolutely objective and humane evaluation of scientific knowledge.

Of course, the subject of reproduction and its scientific control sits on the rhetorical divide between nature and culture, connecting the past and the future not only of individuals and social groups, but of nations, as well. It is therefore fraught with political significance. Because reproduction is so centrally linked to women's bodies, it has served as a touchstone of feminist theory and practice for more than three decades now. Issues of equality and difference, women's oppression and accomplishment, our place in public life and social policies and the resources needed to improve it - in all their complex and stratified diversity - necessarily engage reproductive issues. When in the 1990s Faye Ginsburg and I assessed the "politics of reproduction" for an Annual Review piece, deciding to organize the conference which led to our edited volume, Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, we ambitiously hoped to move the study of reproduction to the center of social theory in anthropology. Of course, Margaret Mead had been there first. In collaboration with the psychologist Niles Newton - and informally with Newton's obstetrician husband, Michael Newton - she had authored several essays during the 1960s on the "cultural pattern of perinatal behavior." Normative in its core, this work laid out in great detail the state of cross-cultural knowledge at the time and an agenda for further interdisciplinary and applied research, confidently assuming the authority of scientific expertise. Anthropologists, psychologists, research physicians, health service planners should have both the collaborative data and the authority to come up with better maternal/child health interventions. Yet the women's health movement was quick to interrogate whether and to what degree scientific bio-medical knowledge was simply a benign and enabling presence in the life of most pregnant women and their families. Feminist scholars quickly began to investigate the places where women's bodies and experiences, in all their diversity, intersected bio-medical authority. And as we worked, the project of understanding human nature through the tools of science became more complicated.

Three research projects in my own work illustrate that complexity. First, for many years, I have worked to understand how women of diverse racial/ethnic, class, religious and national backgrounds here in New York understand the offer of genetic testing in pregnancy: What do they want, and not want, from amniocentesis? How do they understand what a fetus is? What does the possibility of childhood disabilities mean to them? What conditions might be worth an abortion? This research led to the publication of Testing Women, Testing the Fetus two years ago, and in it I worked closely with genetic counselors and geneticists, a move that I think Margaret Mead would have approved of. But I also problematized the intersection where scientific understandings meet family dilemmas, and this would have made her, I think, far less comfortable.

To pluck one example from many to show you what I mean, while watching a genetic counselor in the heart of Brooklyn, at a public hospital serving many, many immigrant populations, especially from the Caribbean, one day I observed an interaction in French, an interaction in which a husband, an evangelical, Protestant minister (Haitian) was translating the offer of an amniocentesis for his wife, pregnant with their third child. When offered an amnio (and they had explained what chromosomes were, what the test was for and what you could find out), he said, "What is this 'retarded,'" referring to the offer of an amnio to screen for Down's syndrome. "What is this 'retarded?' They always say that Haitian children are retarded. But if we put them in the Haitian Academy ( a private, community-based school in Brooklyn), they do just fine." In order to take apart that example, one would have to think not only about his patriarchal and evangelical zeal, but also about the history of migration, the global encounter with racism and what public education had provided and not provided for recent immigrant children, especially when they could be assimilated to the tropes of race in this country, at that time. It's a much more complicated picture that I'm trying to pursue there, rather than just saying, "Well, science offers neutral tools, and people simply have to be educated to understand the rational value."

The question of whose knowledge counts where in society, as we all rev up for these kinds of genomic dreams, is a very problematic notion. Indeed, perhaps someday gene therapy or stem cell therapy, which now seem to be on a kind of bio-medical and cultural horizon, will be actualized. And, of course, the expansion of these fantasies, as well as their possibilities, is deeply linked to NASDAQ's wild ride in our stock economy, in our particular moment of capital accumulation. Our national fascination with gene dreams is, thus, hardly innocent of a political economy of power. So that's my second example.

In this project, we want to know more about what we strongly suspect is a hidden "army of mothers" who have professionalized remedial reading, and speech and occupational therapy, in the service of normalizing atypical children. Above all, we are interested in the growing public presence of families with disabled members on the Internet, the Oprah Show, the science section of The New York Times, in novels and self-help books, all narrating their stories. We believe they're operating under what we call "a narrative urgency." As the tension between reproductive choice and techno-scientific interventions is growing more and more intense, they need to tell their story of disability as part of quotidian, daily life. Thus, the authority of science as a powerful construction that lives inside of social relations here meets a feminist attentiveness to family difference, eugenic fears and aspirations.

By way of conclusion, the cultural landscape I have been describing is rapidly expanding its horizons. So, too, are our understandings of how science and reproduction are powerfully intertwined. To all this innovation, W.W.M.M.S.? (What Would Margaret Mead Say?) What would she have said to the American public? The generations of feminist analysts who have followed Mead cannot aspire to her public presence as a singular and uniquely charismatic public intellectual. She got their first. But collectively, we are surely on the case. And we know that, with her extraordinary appetite for cultural innovation, she would have used that famous thumb-stick to point our attention to the intersection of reproductive technologies and disability consciousness, saying, "Now watch this very carefully."