Linking worlds

A Theoretical Reflection on Some Preconditions for Ethnographic Collaborations in Personalized Medicine

Bibliographic Data

ID6136372
AuthorsJosé Carlos Pinto Da Costa (0000-0002-9948-1670, Centre for Research in Anthropology, corresponding author)
Year2019
Issue36
Pages165-190
Publication date2019-12-11
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAntropologia Portuguesa (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0870-0990 • E-ISSN: 2182-7982
PublisherCoimbra University Press (PUBLISHER • PT)
DOI10.14195/2182-7982_36_8
OpenAlexW2995949216
LanguageEN
References cited54

Precision, or personalized, medicine (PM) is a ground-breaking approach to medical care which aims to predict, prevent and treat diseases by studying, on an individual scale, the pathogenic potential of the association between genetic and environmental factors. As one of the most important outcomes of biotechnological research, PM is generated in the lab. Nonetheless, the impacts of PM will be observed outside of the lab, namely, on the modification of population’s patterns of use and access to healthcare. Taking PM as object of study, anthropologists are challenged to make a double reflection. The first consists in understanding which peculiarities an ethnography should have to grasp engineers’ and other experts’ underlying modes of knowing and doing inside de lab. The second, more analytical, consists in identifying the indicators revealed by that ethnography which may promote an interpretation of how these modes simultaneously mirror and resonate a given cultural will located both upstream and downstream the lab — from and to outside of it. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the hypothesis stressing that an ethnographic collaboration might configure an effective way of doing this

Bioinformatics · Biology · Cartography · Data science · Downstream (manufacturing · Engineering ethics · Epistemology · Ethnography · Geography · GRASP · Health care · Interpretation (philosophy · Object (grammar · Personalized medicine · Political science · Population · Reflection (computer programming · Scale (ratio · Sociology · Upstream (networking · Anthropology · Biotechnology and Related Fields · Computer Science · Engineering · Nutrition, Genetics, and Disease · Philosophy · Psychology · Race, Genetics, and Society · Artificial Intelligence

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