corner
Healthy Skepticism
Join us to help reduce harm from misleading health information.
Increase font size   Decrease font size   Print-friendly view   Print
Register Log in

Healthy Skepticism Library item: 11640

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: Journal Article

Hedgecoe A, Martin P.
The Drugs Don't Work : Expectations and the Shaping of Pharmacogenetics
Social Studies of Science 2003 Jun 1; 33:(3):327-364
http://sss.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/33/3/327


Abstract:

This article examines one particular set of technologies arising from developments in human genetics, those aimed at improving the targeting, design and use of conventional small molecule drugs – pharmacogenetics. Much of the debate about the applications and consequences of pharmacogenetics has been highly speculative, since little or no working technology is yet on the market. This article provides a novel analysis of the development of pharmacogenetics, and the social and ethical issues it raises, based on the sociology of technological expectations. In particular, it outlines how two alternative visions for the development of the technology are being articulated and embedded in a range of heterogeneous discourses, artefacts, actor strategies and practices, including: competing scientific research agendas, experimental technologies, emerging industrial structures and new ethical discourses. Expectations of how pharmacogenetics might emerge in each of these arenas are actively shaping the trajectory of this nascent technology and its potential socio-economic consequences.

Keywords:
expectations • genetics • genomics • biotechnology • pharmaceutical • bioethics

 

  Healthy Skepticism on RSS   Healthy Skepticism on Facebook   Healthy Skepticism on Twitter

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Click to Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts


If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Email a Friend








There is no sin in being wrong. The sin is in our unwillingness to examine our own beliefs, and in believing that our authorities cannot be wrong. Far from creating cynics, such a story is likely to foster a healthy and creative skepticism, which is something quite different from cynicism.”
- Neil Postman in The End of Education