The Human Genome Diversity Project was an important controversial research program arising from the debates surrounding the mapping of the human genome. This book, based on a detailed ethnographic study of two laboratories involved in the project, explores issues concerning standardization, naturalization and diversity generated in day-to-day work by scientists and technicians.

This work explores the way changes in technology have affected the relationship between ethics and medicine, generating new approaches to ethical issues and the implications of medical practice. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research with families affected by Huntington's Disease, Monica Konrad explores the huge disparity between the experience of living with the results of genetic testing and the knowledge and expertise to develop policy, clinical services and support.

When a French biotechnology company seeks patients in Buenos Aires with bipolar disorder for its gene discovery program, they have unexpected trouble finding enough subjects for the study. In Argentina, the predominant form of mental health expertise psychoanalysis does not recognize the legitimacy of bipolar disorder as a diagnostic entity. This problem points to a broader set of political and epistemological debates in global psychiatry. Drawing from an ethnography of psychiatric practice in Buenos Aires, Andrew Lakoff follows the contested extension of novel techniques for understanding...

This book applies a social science perspective to an examination of issues that arise in clinical practice as a result of drug development linked to genetic testing. These include the social context within which new drugs undergo trials and the related attitudes and expectations of clinicians and patients. Two case studies illustrate the arguments--one on aspects of Alzheimer's disease, and the other on the drug Herceptin which is used in the treatment of breast cancer.

The Human Genome Diversity Project was an important controversial research program arising from the debates surrounding the mapping of the human genome. This book, based on a detailed ethnographic study of two laboratories involved in the project, explores issues concerning standardization, naturalization and diversity generated in day-to-day work by scientists and technicians.

This work explores the way changes in technology have affected the relationship between ethics and medicine, generating new approaches to ethical issues and the implications of medical practice. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research with families affected by Huntington's Disease, Monica Konrad explores the huge disparity between the experience of living with the results of genetic testing and the knowledge and expertise to develop policy, clinical services and support.

This book applies a social science perspective to an examination of issues that arise in clinical practice as a result of drug development linked to genetic testing. These include the social context within which new drugs undergo trials and the related attitudes and expectations of clinicians and patients. Two case studies illustrate the arguments--one on aspects of Alzheimer's disease, and the other on the drug Herceptin which is used in the treatment of breast cancer.

Since the early twentieth century, hormones have commonly been understood as 'messengers of sex'. They are seen as essential to the development and functioning of healthy reproductive male and female bodies; millions take them as medications in the treatment of fertility, infertility and ageing. However, in contemporary society, hormones are both disturbed and disturbing; invading our environments and bodies through plastics, food and water, environmental estrogens and other chemicals, threatening irreversible, inter-generational bodily change. Using a wide range of sources, from physiology...