The anthropologist and the bioengineer: A theoretical reflection on some preconditions for ethnographic collaborations in Personalized Medicine

By applying genomics research and cutting-edge technologies to the imaging and analysis of molecular-based biomarkers, precision, or personalized, medicine (PM) is a groundbreaking approach to medical care which aims to predict, prevent and treat diseases by providing healthcare according to the genetic variability of individuals and the socio-environmental context in which they live. The impacts of PM on future use and access to healthcare will surely be enormous, and, anthropologists should not disregard them. As the most important outcome of biotechnological research, PM is generated in the lab, making anthropologists reflect about how to grasp engineers’ and other experts’ underlying modes of knowing inside this emergent fieldsite and how to analyse the discursive transduction of the outcomes of such modes through everyday practices outside it. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on this hypothesis, stressing that an experimental ethnographic collaboration might configure an effective way of doing this.