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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 reconfi the scope and meaning of genomics as "personalised" medicine.

Through a comparion of etnographic research in the UK and Brazil, this chapter has examined now changing scientific and medical understandings regarding the origin, genealogical history and patrimony of the so-called Ashkenazi mutations have been diversely taken up and put to use in clinical/research contexts. It has explored the very differing differing differing consequences this can have for the way health care practitioners, scientists, patients and their families engage with and incorporate knowledge about hereditary BRCA mutations into scientific narratives, clinical practices and understandings of clinical/familial risk and identity.

"The edited collection brings together social and biological anthropology scholars, biologists, and geneticists to examine the interface between Genetic Admixture, Identity and Health, directly contributing to an emerging field of 'bio-cultural anthropology.' It focuses on the neglected region of South America with scientific and social science contributions from Brazil, Columbia, Argentina, and Uruguay and commentaries from leading experts in the UK and the United States. As such the collection contributes to the urgent task of nurturing and advancing a cross disciplinary community that can address and examine a topical set of theoretical issues, brought about by the rapidly changing field of genetic science. "--

The relationship among genetic technologies, biosocial identity and patient subjectivity has been the focus of an increasing range of social science literature. Examining mainly European and North American contexts this work has demonstrated the variable configurations of genetic knowledge-practices and the diverse implications for at-risk individuals and populations. This article brings together ethnographic research on genomic medicine, public health and breast cancer in Cuba, Greece and Germany. Although each case study addresses different publics/patients, institutional settings and risk-related practices, they all critically examine 'neoliberal' subjectivity and BRCA patienthood, at the intersection of political rationalities, medical discourses, social conditions and moral codes. In the Cuban case, cultural articulations of inherited and other embodied risks relating to breast cancer are analysed in relation to state provision of 'community genetics', and the shifting dynamics of public health in response to global social processes. The Greek case explores how culturally embedded values, notions of inherited risk and care inform or are re-articulated through institutional practices and ambivalent subject positions, at the meeting point between individualised medicine, religious philanthropy and the particularities of public health. In the German context, diverging patient subjectivities are examined against the background of prevailing social discourses and institutionalised risk management practices that promote proactive individuality. Drawing on deconstructive and feminist analyses, these case studies reveal how normative 'neoliberal' patient subjects are only 'partially reproduced' in situated contexts, neither stable nor homogeneous, as different actors and publics variously articulate, embrace or engage with transnational as well as culturally embedded discourses and health practices.

Degeneração e eugenia na história da psiquiatria moderna / Sandra Caponi -- "Agressividade" e "violência" : a difícil tarefa de conceituar no diálogo entre geneticistas e cientistas sociais / Gláucia Silva -- Saúde, longevidade e genética : um olhar biopolítico / Luis David Castiel -- Doação de sêmen e classificação étnico-racial no Brasil / Rosely Gomes Costa -- Identidade genética no debate sobre o estatuto de fetos e embriões / Naara Luna -- A "molecularização" do câncer de próstata : reflexões sobre o chip de DNA / Marko Monteiro, Ricardo Z.N. Vêncio -- Usos políticos da leucopenia e diferença racial no Brasil contemporâneo / Elena Calvo-Gonzáles -- A importância de ser uro : movimentos indígenas, políticas de identidade e pesquisa genética nos Andes peruanos / Michael Kent -- Biorevelações : testes de ancestralidade genética em perspectiva antropológica comparada / Verlan Valle Gaspar Neto, Ricardo Ventura Santos, Michael Kent.

Public funding for research on the action of drugs in countries like the United States requires that racial classification of research subjects should be considered when defining the composition of the samples as well as in data analysis, sometimes resulting in interpretations that Whites and Blacks differ in their pharmacogenetic profiles. In Brazil, pharmacogenomic results have led to very different interpretations when compared with those obtained in the United States. This is explained as deriving from the genomic heterogeneity of the Brazilian population. This article argues that in the evolving field of pharmacogenomics research in Brazil there is simultaneously both an incorporation and rejection of the US informed race-genes paradigm. We suggest that this must be understood in relation to continuities with national and transnational history of genetic research in Brazil, a differently situated politics of Brazilian public health and the ongoing valorization of miscegenation or race mixture by Brazilian geneticists as a resource for transnational genetic research. Our data derive from anthropological investigation conducted in INCA (Brazilian National Cancer Institute), in Rio de Janeiro, with a focus on the drug warfarin. The criticism of Brazilian scientists regarding the uses of racial categorization includes a revision of mathematical algorithms for drug dosage widely used in clinical procedures around the world. Our analysis reveals how the incorporation of ideas of racial purity and admixture, as it relates to the efficacy of drugs, touches on issues related to the possibility of application of pharmaceutical technologies on a global scale.

''Undone science'' refers to areas of research that are left unfunded, incomplete, or generally ignored but that social movements or civil society organizations often identify as worthy of more research. This study mobilizes four recent studies to further elaborate the concept of undone science as it relates to the political construction of research agendas. Using these cases, we develop the argument that undone science is part of a broader politics of knowledge, wherein multiple and competing groups struggle over the construction and implementation of alternative research agendas. Overall, the study demonstrates the analytic potential of the concept of undone science to deepen understanding of the systematic nonproduction of knowledge in the institutional matrix of state, industry, and social movements that is characteristic of recent calls for a ''new political sociology of science.''

"Undone science" refers to areas of research that are left unfunded, incomplete, or generally ignored but that social movements or civil society organizations often identify as worthy of more research. This study mobilizes four recent studies to further elaborate the concept of undone science as it relates to the political construction of research agendas. Using these cases, we develop the argument that undone science is part of a broader politics of knowledge, wherein multiple and competing groups struggle over the construction and implementation of alternative research agendas. Overall, the study demonstrates the analytic potential of the concept of undone science to deepen understanding of the systematic nonproduction of knowledge in the institutional matrix of state, industry, and social movements that is characteristic of recent calls for a "new political sociology of science."