Plenumssitzung 1 :
BIOTECHNOLOGIE
UND GESELLSCHAFT
Biology Is Elsewhere: Cutting-Edge Evidence in Illnesses You Have To Fight To Get
Suffering with illnesses like Gulf War Syndrome, Attention Deficit Disorder, Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in present-day U.S. requires negotiating medical, bureaucratic, mass media, and everyday challenges. Being sick with emergent sociomedical illnesses necessitates becoming an expert at living in Risk Society. Sufferers have responded with collective action that involves identity formation, internet collaboration, mass media intervention, and support groups. Together, these actions take the form of new social movements.
This paper discusses the tactical openness of evidence in the face of the diverse venues where the truth of bioscience is decided. Drawing upon fieldwork and studies of controversial illnesses, I have identified a set of strategies for articulating the meaning of science:
Each of these four relations to biological uncertainty becomes available after the data is in. Focusing on such controversial scientific questions of biological uncertainty brings quickly to the fore the implications of the bargain made when the biosciences stepped to the center of the public notion of truth and ethics. This forced the venues of public decisions - courts, companies, communities and social movements - to have to arbitrate bioscience in order to decide truth and ethics. Perhaps we can say that bioscience thus entered into a Faustian bargain. In return for occupying the role of arbiter of truth and ethics, technoscience becomes subject to the often unscientific rationalities of these other domains.
Joseph Dumit is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Science Studies in the Program in Science, Technology and Society at MIT; chair of the Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology and Medicine of the American Anthropological Association; former NIMH fellow in Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and postdoctoral fellow at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science. This spring he is a Visiting Professor at the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University.
His PhD in History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz, was an ethnography and cultural analysis of PET Scan functional brain imaging. He is revising his manuscript on Mindful Images: Brain Scans and Personhood in Biomedical America.
He is the assistant editor of the journal Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry and he has co-edited two books: Cyborgs and Citadels: Anthropological Interventions in Science, Technology and Medicine (with Gary Downey; SAR Press), and Cyborg Babies: From Techno-sex to Techno-tots (with Robbie Davis-Floyd; Routledge). His current work is on the role of biological facts in psychopharmaceuticals and in social movements around contested illnesses.
