The Molecular Gaze PDF Download

Author: Suzanne Anker
Publisher: CSHL Press
ISBN: 9780879696979
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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

Author: Andrew J. Hogan
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421420740
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
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.

Author: Jennifer S. Singh
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452949824
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
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.

Author: David B. Morris
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674977939
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
Susan Sontag once described illness as “the night-side of life.” When we or our loved ones fall ill, our world is thrown into darkness and disarray, our routines are interrupted, our deepest beliefs shaken. The modern regime of hyper-logical biomedicine offers little solace when it comes to the effects of ill health on our inner lives. By exploring the role of desire in illness, Eros and Illness offers an alternative: an unconventional, deeply human exploration of what it means to live with, and live through, disease. When we face down illness, something beyond biomedicine’s extremely valuable advances in treatment and prevention is sorely needed. Desire in its many guises plays a crucial part in illness, David Morris shows. Emotions, dreams, and stories—even romance and eroticism—shape our experiences as patients and as caregivers. Our perception of the world we enter through illness—including too often a world of pain—is shaped by desire. Writing from his own heartbreaking experience as a caretaker for his wife, Morris relates how desire can worsen or, with care, mitigate the heavy weight of disease. He looks to myths, memoirs, paintings, performances, and narratives to understand how illness is intertwined with the things we value most dearly. Drawing on cultural resources from many centuries and media, Eros and Illness reaches out a hand to guide us through the long night of illness, showing us how to find productive desire where we expected only despair and defeat.

Author: Niki Vermeulen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317174224
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
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.

Author: Alexander I. Stingl
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498501931
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 427

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Book Description
Trouble is afoot in Digital Culture and Nerdland. These are, Alexander I. Stingl claims, not the engine of freedom and democracy that they once were hailed to be – this much is already clear in the wake of the snooping and surveillance crises that broke in recent years. Digitalization is but another version of the coloniality of power and being that has been at work for decades and centuries. He poses the question, whether Digital Age possess the legitimacy that ‘digitalization’ has claimed. His response is critically realistic, but he doesn’t stop at a critique for criticism’s sake. Inspired by the ideas of decolonial scholars, feminist science studies, current biological and neuro-cognitive research, and sociologists capable of reflection and self-criticism, Stingl attempts to ‘break’ the canvas of sociology and show that adding a third and decolonial dimension to the two-dimensional sociological imagination is indeed possible. He illustrates that it is possible that class-rooms, free speech on internet, and the inequalities in the production and distribution of a new form of social capital – digital cultural health care capital – can be subjected to a decolonial perspective along a sociological line of inquiry, if sociologists allow for relations with other disciplines and scholarship to be integrative conversations. The goal of this book is not to offer results or closed arguments but to create, instead, platforms for thinking further, opening new lines of inquiry, and to argue that it is not enough to identify problems or to attempt solve the problems with politics or best practice solutions. Instead, he proposes, we must learn to identify and make use of the opportunities that are produced by any problem. Stingl’s conclusion is, in short, that a sociology that takes the decolonial challenge and critique seriously, can not be a sociological (sub)discipline or a sociology of (a) problem, but it must be a sociology of opportunities.

Author: Lisa Blackman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000180506
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
Questions around 'the body' are central to social theory. Our changing understanding of the body now challenges the ways we conceive power, ideology, subjectivity and social and cultural process. The Body: the key concepts highlights and analyses the debates which make the body central to current sociological, psychological, cultural and feminist thinking. Today, questions around the body are intrinsic to a wide range of debates - from technological developments in media and communications, to socio-cultural questions around representation, performance, class, race, gender and sexuality, to the more 'physical' concerns of health and illness, sleep, diet and eating disorders, body parts and the senses.The Body: the key concepts is the ideal introduction for any student seeking a concise and up-to-date analysis of the complex and influential debates around the body in contemporary culture.

Author: Erik Parens
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190940387
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
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.

Author: Nikolas Rose
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400827507
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
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.

Author: Daniel Navon
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022663812X
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
With every passing year, more and more people learn that they or their young or unborn child carries a genetic mutation. But what does this mean for the way we understand a person? Today, genetic mutations are being used to diagnose novel conditions like the XYY, Fragile X, NGLY1 mutation, and 22q11.2 Deletion syndromes, carving out rich new categories of human disease and difference. Daniel Navon calls this form of categorization “genomic designation,” and in Mobilizing Mutations he shows how mutations, and the social factors that surround them, are reshaping human classification. Drawing on a wealth of fieldwork and historical material, Navon presents a sociological account of the ways genetic mutations have been mobilized and transformed in the sixty years since it became possible to see abnormal human genomes, providing a new vista onto the myriad ways contemporary genetic testing can transform people’s lives. Taking us inside these shifting worlds of research and advocacy over the last half century, Navon reveals the ways in which knowledge about genetic mutations can redefine what it means to be ill, different, and ultimately, human.