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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Inventing Traditions, Raising Expectations. Recent Debates on “Personalized Medicine”

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Since the late 1990s, the term “Personalized Medicine” has been coined to enable collaborations between different stakeholders in and outside research units. As a concept, it constitutes an imaginary framework of expectations and claims for a better, patient-centered and efficient health care system. Rather than deciding whether such trends represent “hype” or “hope”, scholars from the social studies of technology and science emphasize that the expectations revolving around new technology are not only accessory parts of scientific inventions or innovation networks. Instead, they regard them essential in shaping these technologies. The aim of the following chapters 4 and 5 is twofold: (4) analyzing the semantic and socio-cultural contexts in which new technologies could come into being or be implemented on a larger scale (5) analyzing the continuing significance of epistemological key categories (e.g. the focus on the biological individuality) in the field of medical research and practice, and their influence on past visions of medical future.