Sociology Seminar with Richard Tutton on Personalizing Biomedicine

Date: 12 March 2013 Time: 4.15pm to 6pm

Venue: Bowland North SR22

Personalizing Biomedicine? From Care to Capital

Today, biomedicine is said to have undergone a shift from the universalization of knowledge and interventions to their customization (Clarke et al 2010). In this talk I trace how in the past, clinicians championed the cause of personalization to argue for a certain 'logic of care' (Mol 2008) practised by doctors that centred on knowing the person of the patient. In this context, the idea of 'personalized medicine' was an expression of a movement within medicine that started in the interwar years to promote a more holistic approach to the diagnosis and treatment of patients. This challenged what was seen as biomedicine's reductionist and universalizing approach to health and disease. Today, the term personalized medicine has been taken up by scientists to describe how genomics and new computing technologies provides a more scientific approach to personalization. However, as I show, this is not addressed to the irreducible uniqueness of individuals but to production of differences that distinguishes groups of people for differential biomedical diagnosis and treatment. I trace where this practice of 'personalizing' medicine came from and consider its implications for how health and disease is acted upon in society.

Event website: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/profiles/Richard-Tutton/

Contact:

Who can attend: Anyone

Further information

Associated staff: Richard Tutton

Organising departments and research centres: Centre for Science Studies, Health and Welfare Policy Analysis, Health Inequalities and the Psychological and Social Determinants of Health and Well-being, Sociology

Keywords: Biodiversity, Bioethics