Craft in Biomedical Research

✍ Scribed by Mianna Meskus

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US
• Year: 2018
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 243
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book explores the new ways in which biology is becoming technology. The revolutionary iPS cell technology has made it possible to turn human skin and blood cells into pluripotent stem cells, thus providing an unprecedented opportunity to study the pathophysiology of diseases, understand human developmental biology, and generate new therapies. Drawing from a rich ethnographic study, Meskus traces the making of the iPS cell technology through the perspectives of clinical translation, laboratory experimentation, and tissue donation by voluntary patients. Discussing non-human agency, the embodied and affective basis of knowledge production, and the material politics of science, the book develops the idea of an instrumentality-care continuum as a fundamental dynamic of biomedical craft. This continuum, Meskus argues, opens up a novel perspective to the commercialization and industrial-scale appropriation of human biology, and thereby to the future of ethical biomedical research.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter ....Pages i-xiii
Introduction (Mianna Meskus)....Pages 1-41
Front Matter ....Pages 43-43
Human Cells to the Market (Mianna Meskus)....Pages 45-77
Between Craft and Standardized Production (Mianna Meskus)....Pages 79-104
Front Matter ....Pages 105-105
Making iPS Cells in the Laboratory (Mianna Meskus)....Pages 107-146
Instrumentality and Care in Experimental Research (Mianna Meskus)....Pages 147-177
Front Matter ....Pages 179-179
Patients and the Material Origins of Knowledge (Mianna Meskus)....Pages 181-215
Scientific Craftwork in the Age of Bioindustrialization (Mianna Meskus)....Pages 217-232
Back Matter ....Pages 233-240

✦ Subjects

Social Sciences; Science and Technology Studies; Medical Sociology; Theory of Medicine/Bioethics