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Cambridge Studies in Society and the Life Sciences promotes interdisciplinary works in the social sciences that focus on the social shaping, social meaning and social implications of recent developments in the life sciences. Interdisciplinary projects will be encouraged with a strong empirical and ethnographic base that explores topics within the context of an internationalised world of science as well as recognising national variations in ethical, moral and legal codes and mores.

  • General Editors: Nikolas Rose, London School of Economics, Paul Rabinow, University of California, Berkeley
  • Editorial Boards: Patrick Bateson, University of Cambridge, Paul Billinge, Gene Sage Inc., San Francisco, Michel Morange, École Normale Supérieure, Paris, Martin Richards, University of Cambridge, Marilyn Strathern, University of Cambridge, Steven Shapin, University of California, San Diego

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5 results in Cambridge Studies in Society and the Life Sciences

The Human Genome Diversity Project
  • An Ethnography of Scientific Practice
  • Amade M'Charek
  • Published online:
    06 July 2010
    Print publication:
    20 January 2005
  • The Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) was launched in 1991 by a group of population geneticists whose aim was to map genetic diversity in hundreds of human populations by tracing the similarities and differences between them. It quickly became controversial and was accused of racism and 'bad science' because of the special interest paid to sampling cell material from isolated and indigenous populations. The author spent a year carrying out participant observation in two of the laboratories involved and provides fascinating insights into daily routines and technologies used in those laboratories and also into issues of normativity, standardization and naturalisation. Drawing on debates and theoretical perspectives from across the social sciences, M'charek explores the relationship between the tools used to produce knowledge and the knowledge thus produced in a way that illuminates the HGDP but also contributes to our broader understanding of the contemporary life sciences and their social implications.

Narrating the New Predictive Genetics
  • Ethics, Ethnography and Science
  • Monica Konrad
  • Published online:
    15 December 2009
    Print publication:
    17 February 2005
  • This book explores the way changes in technology have altered the relationship between ethics and medicine. For some inherited diseases, new genetic testing technologies may provide much more accurate diagnostic and predictive information which raises important questions about consent, confidentiality and use of the information by family members and other third parties. What are the implications of this knowledge for individuals and their families? And for society more widely? How should this new information be used? How do people deal with the choices that new knowledge and technologies offer? Drawing on extensive ethnographic research with families affected by Huntington's Disease, and using perspectives from medical and cultural anthropology, the author explores the huge disparity between the experience of living with the results of genetic testing and the knowledge and expertise which are drawn on to develop policy and clinical services.

The Politics of Personalised Medicine
  • Pharmacogenetics in the Clinic
  • Adam Hedgecoe
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    02 December 2004
  • Pharmacogenetics, the use of genetic testing to prescribe and develop drugs, has been hailed as a revolutionary development for the pharmaceutical industry and modern medicine. Supporters of 'personalised medicine' claim the result will be safer, cheaper, more effective drugs, and their arguments are beginning to influence policy debates. Based on interviews with clinicians, researchers, regulators and company representatives, this book explores the impact of pharmacogenetics on clinical practice, following two cases of personalised medicine as they make their way from the laboratory to the clinic. It highlights the significant differences between the views of supporters of pharmacogenetics in industry and those who use the technology at the clinical 'coal face'. Theoretically, this work builds on the developing area of the sociology of socio-technical expectations, highlighting the way in which promoters of new technologies build expectations around it, through citation and the creation of technological visions.

Pharmaceutical Reason
  • Knowledge and Value in Global Psychiatry
  • Andrew Lakoff
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    05 January 2006
  • Andrew Lakoff argues that a new 'pharmaceutical' way of thinking about and acting upon mental disorder is coming to reshape not only the field of psychiatry, but also our very notions of self. Drawing from a comprehensive ethnography of psychiatric practice in Argentina (a country which boasts the most psychoanalysts per capita in the world) Lakoff looks at new ways of understanding and intervening in human behaviour. He charts the globalization of pharmacology, particularily the global impact of US psychiatry and US models of illness, and further illustrates the clashes, conflicts, alliances and reformulations that take place when psychoanalytic and psychopharmacological models of illness and cure meet. Highlighting the social and political implications that these new forms of expertise about human behaviour and human thought bring, Lakoff presents an arresting case-study that will appeal to scholars and students alike.

Messengers of Sex
  • Hormones, Biomedicine and Feminism
  • Celia Roberts
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    18 October 2007
  • 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 textbooks to popular parenting books and pharmaceutical advertisements, Celia Roberts analyses the multiple ways in which sex hormones have come to matter to us today. Bringing feminist theories of the body into dialogue with science and technology studies, she develops tools to address one of the most important questions facing feminism today: how is biological sex conceivable?