Are experimentation and collaborative participation the best research approaches?

UID/ANT/04038/2013By applying genomics research and cutting-edge technologies to the imaging and the analysis of molecular-based biomarkers, Precision, or Personalized, Medicine (PM) is a groundbreaking medical care approach which aims to predict, prevent and treat diseases thus providing healthcare according to the genetic variability of individuals and the socio-environmental context where they live. The impacts of PM on future use and access to healthcare will be enormous, and anthropologists should not disregard them. As the most important outcome of biotechnological research, PM is generated in the lab, making anthropologists to reflect about how to grasp the underlying engineers’ and other experts’ modes of knowing inside such fieldsite and how to analyze the discursive transduction of the outcomes of such modes into everyday practices outside it. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the hypothesis of ethnographic experimental collaboration as an effective way of doing this.publishersversionpublishe