2 - Pharmacogenetics, expectation and promissory science

Summary

In an age when people in developed societies expect individual treatment in all spheres of life, the provision of drugs often appears clumsy.

Andrew Marshall (1998)

A brief history of pharmacogenetics

The aim of this chapter is to briefly set out the debates about personalised medicine in the professional literature, outline theoretical ideas that might help us get to grips with these arguments, and introduce the two case studies used in this book. As a sociologist of science, one of the interesting things about coming to personalised medicine is the sheer range of people who are willing to write about it and tell you how they think it will develop. The profusion of reviews, editorials and opinion pieces in scientific and medical journals (what we might collectively call ‘commentaries’) that speculate about how medical practice and drug development might look in a few years' time provides a wonderful resource for sociological analysis. What follows is an attempt to unpack some of the claims being made about pharmacogenetics by academic scientists, company representatives and other commentators. Although it is not a comprehensive, quantitative review such as those found in the scientific literature, it does provide a detailed outline of the kinds of concerns that form the context within which pharmacogenetics will move into clinical practice.