Translating genomics: cancer genetics, public health and the making of the (de)molecularised body in Cuba and Brazil

Abstract

This article examines how cancer genetics has emerged as a focus for research and healthcare in Cuba and Brazil. Drawing on ethnographic research undertaken in community genetics clinics and cancer genetics services, the article examines how the knowledge and technologies associated with this novel area of healthcare are translated and put to work by researchers, health professionals, patients and their families in these two contexts. It illuminates the comparative similarities and differences in how cancer genetics is emerging in relation to transnational research priorities, the history and contemporary politics of public health and embodied vulnerability to cancer that reconfigures the scope and meaning of genomics as “personalised” medicine.

Entangled local biologies: genetic risk, bodies and inequities in Brazilian cancer genetics

“…These apparently ‘de-molecularised’ readings of cancer and bodily risk (see Gibbon 2016b ) resonate with well recognised ‘folk’ understandings of the body in Brazil and Latin America where, as Roberts points out, the ‘reciprocal malleability of bodies and environments’ has long been evident ( 2015 ). Social science work in Brazil illustrates the variety of ways the sick body is often perceived as being subject to and produced through exogenous influences, including illnesses such as nervismo in Brazil (Duarte 1986 ) or the embodied consequences of strong emotions for health (Rebhun 1994 ).…”

Calibrating cancer risk, uncertainty and environments: Genetics and their contexts in southern Brazil

“… 7 In other papers I have also discussed how this history of social medicine also shapes the ‘activism’ of health professionals and their commitment to public health (see for instance Gibbon 2016). See also Behague 2015 for a discussion of how the long duree of Brazilian public health has shaped the medicalisation of mental health in Brazil. …”