The ideology of genetic inheritance establishes depth and continuity with previous generations that may be lacking in postmodern society and links people with their biological past that may be considered the source of one’s true personhood. It reinforces or—arguably—reintroduces the experience of the passage of time and defines an intergenerational space. In day-to-day experience aunts, uncles, and even grandparents may not be recalled, but they must be remembered when one is asked for a family medical history.17 (..)
Foremost, the ideology of genetic inheritance promises contemporary humans immortality within the flux of the postmodern world, fastening them biologically to the past and to the future. With the new genetics immortality for the most part was confined to the privileged (Bauman, 1992) but is now available to all, even if it is achieved through memory of disease. Genetic ideology suggests that DNA from the past inexorably repeats itself in the future, and thus the belief in genetic inheritance promises immortality and rebirth. By so doing, it may also help explain why the reduction of the human essence to a gene is so willingly accepted. In a secular world where we may live with the notion of being reduced to nothingness, nothingness can now be transcended by belief in genetic inheritance.

(Kaja Finkler "Family, Kinship, Memory and Temporality in the Age of the New Genetics")