Erik Aarden & Maximilian Fochler discuss Barbara Prainsack`s “Personalized Medicine: Empowered Patients in the 21st Century?”, & Jenny Reardon`s “The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Justice and Knowledge After the Genome”

moderated by Ingrid Metzler

Barbara Prainsack’s Personalized Medicine investigates the recent movement for patients’ involvement in how they are treated, diagnosed, and medicated; a movement that accompanies the increasingly popular idea that people should be proactive, well-informed participants in their own healthcare. While it is often the case that participatory practices in medicine are celebrated as instances of patient empowerment or, alternatively, are dismissed as cases of patient exploitation, Barbara Prainsack challenges these views to illustrate how personalized medicine can give rise to a technology-focused individualism, yet also present new opportunities to strengthen solidarity.

In The Postgenomic Condition, Jenny Reardon critically examines the decade after the Human Genome Project, and the fundamental questions about meaning, value and justice this landmark achievement left in its wake. The Postgenomic Condition shares the challenges of the scientists, entrepreneurs, policy makers, bioethicists, lawyers, and patient advocates who sought to leverage liberal democratic practices to render genomic data a new source of meaning and value for interpreting and caring for life. It brings into rich empirical focus the resulting hard on-the-ground questions about how to know and live on a depleted but data-rich, interconnected yet fractured planet, where technoscience garners significant resources, but deeper questions of knowledge and justice urgently demand attention.

The book launch is jointly organized by the Department of Political Science, the Department of Science and Technology Studies, and the Faculty of Social Sciences’ Key Research Area “Knowledge Societies in Turbulent Times”

Please RSVP by April 20, sending a message to nina.spurny@univie.ac.at

Program download