Every two years, a letter from the Gastroenterology unit drops into Maria’s mailbox. It is a call to attend her regular surveillance colonoscopy to check for potential precancerous polyps which are very likely to grow in Maria’s colon. Maria has Lynch Syndrome, an inherited genetic mutation in one of the mismatch repair genes (MLH1, MSH2, MSH6 and PMS2) that significantly …
The narrative around eating disorders is shifting. Researchers and activists have advanced a more complex understanding of eating disorders by presenting cutting-edge scientific and clinical research (increasingly incorporating insights from genetics and neuroscience) insisting on the importance of listening to and representing the experiences of marginalized groups. The concept of complexity, which can be defined as the state of having …
In late November, He Jiankui, a scientist in China, announced that he had created the first “CRISPR babies,” meaning that he performed germ-line genome edits on human embryos, which were implanted through in vitro fertilization (IVF), and has now resulted the birth of twin girls. He used CRISPR-Cas9, a genome editing technology that can target DNA at precise …
Beyond Bioethics: Toward a New Biopolitics
Osagie K. Obasogie and Marcy Darnovsky (editors)
University of California Press, 2018. 518 pages
“The science will let loose its cascading interactions with utter impassivity; yet how we inhabit that knowledge will be a contest of the imagination, a sedimentation of political futures, a constructed infinity of worlds.” —Patricia J. Williams
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Subprime Health: Debt and Race in US Medicine
Nadine Ehlers and Leslie R. Hinkson (editors)
University of Minnesota Press, 2017. 256 pages
“The focus on race in medicine and the hard sciences,” write Nadine Ehlers and Leslie R. Hinkson in their introduction to the new edited volume Subprime Health: Debt and Race in US Medicine, “creates unintended consequences—forms …
The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Justice, and Knowledge after the Genome
University of Chicago Press, 2017, 304 pages.
Genetics: A Situated View
How enduring is the love affair between our societies and genetics (today genomics)? And what is the role of critical social science in undermining or, rather, mirroring the power of this romance? And what do we …