New Genetics and Society · Published 2021-12-11 · DOI 10.1080/14636778.2021.1997577
This paper examines the emerging field of molecular oncology, in which targeted treatments are sought for patients who have exhausted standard cancer therapies. Drawing on an ethnographic study at a U.S. academic medical center, and building on recent theoretical work examining potentiality as a site where expectations, meaning and value are produced, I describe efforts to translate genetic information into extended life for patients. Clinicians, patients and families performed various types of largely-unrecognized labor that invested precision medicine with potential even when life-prolonging therapies remained elusive. Their future-making work was enabled and constrained by the structural conditions of U.S. health care. In this context potentiality was a generative force that was harnessed to the interests and inequities of a market-driven health system, raising important questions about who is able to participate in, contribute to, and benefit from emerging innovations and narratives of hope.
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