Bench, bedside, boardroom: negotiating translational gene therapy
Research output: Contribution to journal › Journal article › Research › peer-review
This article presents ethnographic material from a London-based group of gene therapists who received the opportunity to trial a device that, its makers claimed, would expedite and improve their cell work. The Vanguard cell processor elicits both enthusiasm and ambivalence from group members, which I seek to understand by examining the group’s current manner of working alongside the device and its purported virtues. I show that cell processing currently involves complex practices of recognition, attention, care, and involvement, which answer to both the liveliness of cells and the experimentality of gene therapy. I read these practices as a well-honed configuration of productive engagements and detachments, which the Vanguard would thoroughly rearticulate. I thus argue that translational gene therapy is a site at which private and academic interests meet, and that translation more generally might be seen as a space where the relational format of science is renegotiated.
Original language | English |
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Journal | New Genetics and Society |
Volume | 36 |
Issue number | 1 |
Pages (from-to) | 22-42 |
Number of pages | 21 |
ISSN | 1463-6778 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2017 |
- detachment/engagement, gene therapy, translation
Research areas
ID: 193582335