The Molecular Gaze

The Molecular Gaze
Author: Suzanne Anker
Publisher: CSHL Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2004
Genre: Antiques & Collectibles
ISBN: 9780879696979

And they suggest the ways in which DNA representations relate to archetypal images that have appeared throughout the history of art."--BOOK JACKET.

Life Histories of Genetic Disease

Life Histories of Genetic Disease
Author: Andrew J. Hogan
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2016-11
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1421420740

A history of genetic testing warns that such tests may tell us more than we want to know. Medical geneticists began mapping the chromosomal infrastructure piece by piece in the 1970s by focusing on what was known about individual genetic disorders. Five decades later, their infrastructure had become an edifice for prevention, allowing today’s expecting parents to choose to test prenatally for hundreds of disease-specific mutations using powerful genetic testing platforms. In Life Histories of Genetic Disease, Andrew J. Hogan explores how various diseases were “made genetic” after 1960, with the long-term aim of treating and curing them using gene therapy. In the process, he explains, these disorders were located in the human genome and became targets for prenatal prevention, while the ongoing promise of gene therapy remained on the distant horizon. In narrating the history of research that contributed to diagnostic genetic medicine, Hogan describes the expanding scope of prenatal diagnosis and prevention. He draws on case studies of Prader-Willi, fragile X, DiGeorge, and velo-cardio-facial syndromes to illustrate that almost all testing in medical genetics is inseparable from the larger—and increasingly “big data”–oriented—aims of biomedical research. Hogan also reveals how contemporary genetic testing infrastructure reflects an intense collaboration among cytogeneticists, molecular biologists, and doctors specializing in human malformation. Hogan critiques the modern ideology of genetic prevention, which suggests that all pregnancies are at risk for genetic disease and should be subject to extensive genomic screening. He examines the dilemmas and ethics of the use of prenatal diagnostic information in an era when medical geneticists and biotechnology companies have begun offering whole genome prenatal screening—essentially searching for any disease-causing mutation. Hogan’s focus and analysis is animated by ongoing scientific and scholarly debates about the extent to which the preventive focus in contemporary medical genetics resembles the aims of earlier eugenicists. Written for historians, sociologists, and anthropologists of science and medicine, as well as bioethics scholars, physicians, geneticists, and families affected by genetic conditions, Life Histories of Genetic Disease is a profound exploration of the scientific culture surrounding malformation and mutation.

The Cosmetic Gaze

The Cosmetic Gaze
Author: Bernadette Wegenstein
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2012-03-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 026230032X

How the act of looking at our own and others' bodies is informed by the techniques, expectations, and strategies of body modification. If the gaze can be understood to mark the disjuncture between how we see ourselves and how we want to be seen by others, the cosmetic gaze—in Bernadette Wegenstein's groundbreaking formulation—is one through which the act of looking at our bodies and those of others is already informed by the techniques, expectations, and strategies (often surgical) of bodily modification. It is, Wegenstein says, also a moralizing gaze, a way of looking at bodies as awaiting both physical and spiritual improvement. In The Cosmetic Gaze, Wegenstein charts this synthesis of outer and inner transformation. Wegenstein shows how the cosmetic gaze underlies the “rebirth” celebrated in today's makeover culture and how it builds upon a body concept that has collapsed into its mediality. In today's beauty discourse—on reality TV and Web sites that collect “bad plastic surgery”—we yearn to experience a bettered self that has been reborn from its own flesh and is now itself, like a digitally remastered character in a classic Hollywood movie, immortal. Wegenstein traces the cosmetic gaze from eighteenth-century ideas about physiognomy through television makeover shows and facial-recognition software to cinema—which, like our other screens, never ceases to show us our bodies as they could be, drawing life from the very cosmetic gaze it transmits.

Human Nature in an Age of Biotechnology

Human Nature in an Age of Biotechnology
Author: Tamar Sharon
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2013-10-11
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9400775547

New biotechnologies have propelled the question of what it means to be human – or posthuman – to the forefront of societal and scientific consideration. This volume provides an accessible, critical overview of the main approaches in the debate on posthumanism, and argues that they do not adequately address the question of what it means to be human in an age of biotechnology. Not because they belong to rival political camps, but because they are grounded in a humanist ontology that presupposes a radical separation between human subjects and technological objects. The volume offers a comprehensive mapping of posthumanist discourse divided into four broad approaches—two humanist-based approaches: dystopic and liberal posthumanism, and two non-humanist approaches: radical and methodological posthumanism. The author compares and contrasts these models via an exploration of key issues, from human enhancement, to eugenics, to new configurations of biopower, questioning what role technology plays in defining the boundaries of the human, the subject and nature for each. Building on the contributions and limitations of radical and methodological posthumanism, the author develops a novel perspective, mediated posthumanism, that brings together insights in the philosophy of technology, the sociology of biomedicine, and Michel Foucault’s work on ethical subject constitution. In this framework, technology is neither a neutral tool nor a force that alienates humanity from itself, but something that is always already part of the experience of being human, and subjectivity is viewed as an emergent property that is constantly being shaped and transformed by its engagements with biotechnologies. Mediated posthumanism becomes a tool for identifying novel ethical modes of human experience that are richer and more multifaceted than current posthumanist perspectives allow for. The book will be essential reading for students and scholars working on ethics and technology, philosophy of technology, poststructuralism, technology and the body, and medical ethics.

Human Flourishing in an Age of Gene Editing

Human Flourishing in an Age of Gene Editing
Author: Erik Parens
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2019-07-29
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0190940395

International uproar followed the recent announcement of the birth of twin girls whose genomes had been edited with a breakthrough DNA editing-technology. This technology, called clustered regularly interspaced short palindrome repeats or CRISPR-Cas9, can alter any DNA, including DNA in embryos, meaning that changes can be passed to the offspring of the person that embryo becomes. Should we use gene editing technologies to change ourselves, our children, and future generations to come? The potential uses of CRISPR-Cas9 and other gene editing technologies are unprecedented in human history. By using these technologies, we eradicate certain dreadful diseases. Altering human DNA, however, raises enormously difficult questions. Some of these questions are about safety: Can these technologies be deployed without posing an unreasonable risk of physical harm to current and future generations? Can all physical risks be adequately assessed, and responsibly managed? But gene editing technologies also raise other moral questions, which touch on deeply held, personal, cultural, and societal values: Might such technologies redefine what it means to be healthy, or normal, or cherished? Might they undermine relationships between parents and children, or exacerbate the gap between the haves and have-nots? The broadest form of this second kind of question is the focus of this book: What might gene editing--and related technologies--mean for human flourishing? In the new essays collected here, an interdisciplinary group of scholars asks age--old questions about the nature and well-being of humans in the context of a revolutionary new biotechnology--one that has the potential to change the genetic make-up of both existing people and future generations. Welcoming readers who study related issues and those not yet familiar with the formal study of bioethics, the authors of these essays open up a conversation about the ethics of gene editing. It is through this conversation that citizens can influence laws and the distribution of funding for science and medicine, that professional leaders can shape understanding and use of gene editing and related technologies by scientists, patients, and practitioners, and that individuals can make decisions about their own lives and the lives of their families.

Bio-Objects

Bio-Objects
Author: Niki Vermeulen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2016-04-15
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1317174224

Increasing knowledge of the biological is fundamentally transforming what life itself means and where its boundaries lie. New developments in the biosciences - especially through the molecularisation of life - are (re)shaping healthcare and other aspects of our society. This cutting edge volume studies contemporary bio-objects, or the categories, materialities and processes that are central to the configuring of 'life' today, as they emerge, stabilize and circulate through society. Examining a variety of bio-objects in contexts beyond the laboratory, Bio-Objects: Life in the 21st Century explores new ways of thinking about how novel bio-objects enter contemporary life, analysing the manner in which, among others, the boundaries between human and animal, organic and non-organic, and being 'alive' and the suspension of living, are questioned, destabilised and in some cases re-established. Thematically organised around questions of changing boundaries; the governance and regulation of bio-objects; and changing social, economic and political relations, this book presents rich new case studies from Europe that will be of interest to scholars of science and technology studies, social theory, sociology and law.

Making Death Matter

Making Death Matter
Author: Tara Mehrabi
Publisher: Linköping University Electronic Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2016-11-18
Genre:
ISBN: 9176856550

This thesis is a contribution to feminist laboratory studies and a critical engagement with the natural sciences, or more precisely research on the biochemical workings and deadly relations of Alzheimer’s disease emanating from a year of field work in a Drosophila fly lab. The natural sciences have been a point of fascination within the field of gender studies for decades. Such sciences produce knowledge on what gets to count as nature and natural, healthy or sick, normal or not, and they have done it with great societal authority and impact throughout European modernity. However, feminist technoscience scholars argue that science and knowledge is socially produced, and political too. Concepts such as nature, animal, human, body, sex, and life itself are not simply given natural realities but phenomena processed through the naturecultures of the laboratory. Situated within such theoretical and methodological approaches, this thesis wonders how scientific facts about Alzheimer’s disease are made in the lab today. What kinds of realities, bodies and ethico-political concerns are enacted? Who gets to live and who gets to die in everyday laboratory practices? Theoretically, the thesis is grounded, particularly, within Karen Barad’s agential realism and posthumanist performativity, and as such it accounts for human and nonhuman entanglements through which AD is performed in the lab in relational ways. In other words, the thesis explores how AD is enacted in the bodies of transgenic fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster), as these flies embody the disease, live and die with it. Last but not least, the thesis explores the materialities of death, dying, embodiment and biological waste in a biochemistry lab as constitutive parts of the produced knowledge about AD.

Multiple Autisms

Multiple Autisms
Author: Jennifer S. Singh
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2015-12-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1452949824

Is there a gene for autism? Despite a billion-dollar, twenty-year effort to find out—and the more elusive the answer, the greater the search seems to become—no single autism gene has been identified. In Multiple Autisms, Jennifer S. Singh sets out to discover how autism emerged as a genetic disorder and how this affects those who study autism and those who live with it. This is the first sustained analysis of the practices, politics, and meaning of autism genetics from a scientific, cultural, and social perspective. In 2004, when Singh began her research, the prevalence of autism was reported as 1 in 150 children. Ten years later, the number had jumped to 1 in 100, with the disorder five times more common in boys than in girls. Meanwhile the diagnosis changed to “autistic spectrum disorders,” and investigations began to focus more on genomics than genetics, less on single genes than on hundreds of interacting genes. Multiple Autisms charts this shift and its consequences through nine years of ethnographic observations, analysis of scientific and related literatures, and morethan seventy interviews with autism scientists, parents of children with autism, and people on the autism spectrum. The book maps out the social history of parental activism in autism genetics, the scientific optimism about finding a gene for autism and the subsequent failure, and the cost in personal and social terms of viewing and translating autism through a genomic lens. How is genetic information useful to people living with autism? By considering this question alongside the scientific and social issues that autism research raises, Singh’s work shows us the true reach and implications of a genomic gaze.

The Genome Incorporated

The Genome Incorporated
Author: Kate O'Riordan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 179
Release: 2016-03-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317030699

The Genome Incorporated examines the proliferation of human genomics across contemporary media cultures. It explores questions about what it means for a technoscience to thoroughly saturate everyday life, and places the interrogation of the science/media relationship at the heart of this enquiry. The book develops a number of case studies in the mediation and consumption of genomics, including: the emergence of new direct-to-the-consumer bioinformatics companies; the mundane propagation of testing and genetic information through lifestyle television programming; and public and private engagements with art and science institutions and events. Through these novel sites, this book examines the proliferating circuits of production and consumption of genetic information and theorizes this as a process of incorporation. Its wide-ranging case studies ensure its appeal to readers across the social sciences.

The Politics of Life Itself

The Politics of Life Itself
Author: Nikolas Rose
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2009-02-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1400827507

For centuries, medicine aimed to treat abnormalities. But today normality itself is open to medical modification. Equipped with a new molecular understanding of bodies and minds, and new techniques for manipulating basic life processes at the level of molecules, cells, and genes, medicine now seeks to manage human vital processes. The Politics of Life Itself offers a much-needed examination of recent developments in the life sciences and biomedicine that have led to the widespread politicization of medicine, human life, and biotechnology. Avoiding the hype of popular science and the pessimism of most social science, Nikolas Rose analyzes contemporary molecular biopolitics, examining developments in genomics, neuroscience, pharmacology, and psychopharmacology and the ways they have affected racial politics, crime control, and psychiatry. Rose analyzes the transformation of biomedicine from the practice of healing to the government of life; the new emphasis on treating disease susceptibilities rather than disease; the shift in our understanding of the patient; the emergence of new forms of medical activism; the rise of biocapital; and the mutations in biopower. He concludes that these developments have profound consequences for who we think we are, and who we want to be.