Open AccessLinking worlds: a theoretical reflection on some preconditions for ethnographic collaborations in personalized medicine
Author(s) -
José Costa
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
antropologia portuguesa
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.118
H-Index - 3
eISSN - 2182-7982
pISSN - 0870-0990
DOI - 10.14195/2182-7982_36_8
Subject(s) - ethnography , grasp , upstream (networking) , reflection (computer programming) , downstream (manufacturing) , object (grammar) , interpretation (philosophy) , epistemology , health care , sociology , scale (ratio) , engineering ethics , population , personalized medicine , data science , computer science , psychology , anthropology , engineering , artificial intelligence , geography , political science , biology , bioinformatics , cartography , philosophy , computer network , operations management , demography , law , programming language
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.