STS Circle at Harvard [image.png] Alberto Cambrosio McGill, Social Studies of Medicine
on When drugs cross disease lines. (Dis)assembling clinical research in post-genomic oncology Monday, March 24 12:15-2:00 pm Room 100F, Pierce Hall, 29 Oxford Street [image.png] Lunch is provided if you RSVP. Please RSVP to sts<mailto:[email protected]>@hks.harvard.edu<mailto:[email protected]> by 5pm Wednesday, March 19. Abstract: Grounded in an empirical analysis of the development of medical oncology from the 1960s-present (and, in particular, of the activities of emergent organizations, such as Cooperative Oncology Groups and, more recently, clinical cancer research consortia), the paper explores the mutually constitutive relation between epistemic and organizational innovation. In particular, it will examine how, confronted with a ‘similar’ issue—the promotion of stronger interactions between pre-clinical and clinical work—1960 oncologists and their turn-of-the-century colleagues developed quite different solutions, in spite of powerful path-dependency effects. These different outcomes cannot be reduced to the actors’ strategies or to a political sociology of science that neglects the content of bio-clinical practices. They correspond to two distinctive socio-technical networks that can be better understood by focusing on their core actant, namely ‘regimens’ (a notion partially borrowed from the oncology field), and the sequence of framings and overflows they engender. While STS has traditionally rejected the distinction between social and cognitive aspects of practices—an approach exemplified by the co-productionist program—social scientists in other domains continue to debate whether organizational innovation leads to cognitive innovation or vice versa, and are still caught in the opposition between configurational (static) and dynamic analysis. Regimens provide a heuristic alternative to these dichotomies. It remains to be seen whether this approach can be applied to domains other than oncology, thus bypassing the opposition between objects (entities) and practices. Biography: A professor at McGill University’s Department of Social Studies of Medicine since 1990, Alberto Cambrosio most recent project examines ‘genomics in action’, i.e., as applied to concrete instances of medical work. His most recent book (Cancer on Trial: Oncology as a New Style of Practice, University of Chicago Press, 2012/pbk 2014 co-authored with Peter Keating) argues that clinical trials do not boil down to a mere technology; they rise to the level of a ‘new style of practice’ insofar as they generate novel, distinctive ways of producing and assessing medical knowledge. This work builds on a previous book (Biomedical Platforms, MIT Press, 2003/pbk 2006, co-authored with Peter Keating) that analyzed the transformation of medicine into biomedicine and its consequences since the end of World War II. Other publications include Exquisite Specificity. The Monoclonal Antibody Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2005, co-authored with Peter Keating). A complete list of STS Circle at Harvard events can be found on our website: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/sts/events/sts_circle/ Follow us on Facebook: STS@Harvard<http://www.facebook.com/HarvardSTS> _______________________________________________
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