The Troubled Dream Of Genetic Medicine

Author : Keith Wailoo
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 9780801883255
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.53/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Troubled Dream of Genetic Medicine written by Keith Wailoo and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2006-05-29 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the History of Science category of the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Awards given by the Association of American Publishers Why do racial and ethnic controversies become attached, as they often do, to discussions of modern genetics? How do theories about genetic difference become entangled with political debates about cultural and group differences in America? Such issues are a conspicuous part of the histories of three hereditary diseases: Tay-Sachs, commonly identified with Jewish Americans; cystic fibrosis, often labeled a "Caucasian" disease; and sickle cell disease, widely associated with African Americans. In this captivating account, historians Keith Wailoo and Stephen Pemberton reveal how these diseases—fraught with ethnic and racial meanings for many Americans—became objects of biological fascination and crucibles of social debate. Peering behind the headlines of breakthrough treatments and coming cures, they tell a complex story: about different kinds of suffering and faith, about unequal access to the promises and perils of modern medicine, and about how Americans consume innovation and how they come to believe in, or resist, the notion of imminent medical breakthroughs. With Tay-Sachs, cystic fibrosis, and sickle cell disease as a powerful backdrop, the authors provide a glimpse into a diverse America where racial ideologies, cultural politics, and conflicting beliefs about the power of genetics shape disparate health care expectations and experiences.

Author : Keith Wailoo
Publisher : Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780801883262
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Troubled Dream of Genetic Medicine written by Keith Wailoo and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2006-04-20 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With Tay-Sachs, cystic fibrosis, and sickle cell disease as a powerful backdrop, the authors provide a glimpse into a diverse America where racial ideologies, cultural politics, and conflicting beliefs about the power of genetics shape disparate health care expectations and experiences.

Author : Mark J. Hanson
Publisher : Georgetown University Press
ISBN 13 : 9781589014442
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Goals of Medicine written by Mark J. Hanson and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2000-10-27 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Debates over health care have focused for so long on economics that the proper goals for medicine seem to be taken for granted; yet problems in health care stem as much from a lack of agreement about the goals and priorities of medicine as from the way systems function. This book asks basic questions about the purposes and ends of medicine and shows that the answers have practical implications for future health care delivery, medical research, and the education of medical students. The Hastings Center coordinated teams of physicians, nurses, public health experts, philosophers, theologians, politicians, health care administrators, social workers, and lawyers in fourteen countries to explore these issues. In this volume, they articulate four basic goals of medicine — prevention of disease, relief of suffering, care of the ill, and avoidance of premature death — and examine them in light of the cultural, political, and economic pressures under which medicine functions. In reporting these findings, the contributors touch on a wide range of diverse issues such as genetic technology, Chinese medicine, care of the elderly, and prevention and public health. The Goals of Medicine clearly demonstrates the importance of clarifying the purposes of medicine before attempting to change the economic and organizational systems. It warns that without such examination, any reform efforts may be fruitless.

Author : Diane B. Paul
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421411318
Total Pages : 316 pages
Book Rating : 4.16/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The PKU Paradox written by Diane B. Paul and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2013-12 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did a disease of marginal public health significance acquire paradigmatic status in public health and genetics? In a lifetime of practice, most physicians will never encounter a single case of PKU. Yet every physician in the industrialized world learns about the disease in medical school and, since the early 1960s, the newborn heel stick test for PKU has been mandatory in many countries. Diane B. Paul and Jeffrey P. Brosco’s beautifully written book explains this paradox. PKU (phenylketonuria) is a genetic disorder that causes severe cognitive impairment if it is not detected and treated with a strict and difficult diet. Programs to detect PKU and start treatment early are deservedly considered a public health success story. Some have traded on this success to urge expanded newborn screening, defend basic research in genetics, and confront proponents of genetic determinism. In this context, treatment for PKU is typically represented as a simple matter of adhering to a low-phenylalanine diet. In reality, the challenges of living with PKU are daunting. In this first general history of PKU, a historian and a pediatrician explore how a rare genetic disease became the object of an unprecedented system for routine testing. The PKU Paradox is informed by interviews with scientists, clinicians, policymakers, and individuals who live with the disease. The questions it raises touch on ongoing controversies about newborn screening and what happens to blood samples collected at birth.

Author : Keith Wailoo
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 0801899591
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.91/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Three Shots at Prevention written by Keith Wailoo and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2007, Texas governor Rick Perry issued an executive order requiring that all females entering sixth grade be vaccinated against the human papillomavirus (HPV), igniting national debate that echoed arguments heard across the globe over public policy, sexual health, and the politics of vaccination. Three Shots at Prevention explores the contentious disputes surrounding the controversial vaccine intended to protect against HPV, the most common sexually transmitted infection. When the HPV vaccine first came to the market in 2006, religious conservatives decried the government's approval of the vaccine as implicitly sanctioning teen sex and encouraging promiscuity while advocates applauded its potential to prevent 4,000 cervical cancer deaths in the United States each year. Families worried that laws requiring vaccination reached too far into their private lives. Public health officials wrestled with concerns over whether the drug was too new to be required and whether opposition to it could endanger support for other, widely accepted vaccinations. Many people questioned the aggressive marketing campaigns of the vaccine's creator, Merck & Co. And, since HPV causes cancers of the cervix, vulva, vagina, penis, and anus, why was the vaccine recommended only for females? What did this reveal about gender and sexual politics in the United States? With hundreds of thousands of HPV-related cancer deaths worldwide, how did similar national debates in Europe and the developing world shape the global possibilities of cancer prevention? This volume provides insight into the deep moral, ethical, and scientific questions that must be addressed when sexual and social politics confront public health initiatives in the United States and around the world.

Author : Andrew J. Hogan
Publisher : Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM
ISBN 13 : 1421420759
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.52/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Life Histories of Genetic Disease written by Andrew J. Hogan and published by Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM. This book was released on 2016-10-30 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A richly detailed history that “uncovers the challenges and limitations of our increasing reliance on genetic data in medical decision making” (Shobita Parthasarathy, author of Building Genetic Medicine). Medical geneticists began mapping the chromosomal infrastructure piece by piece in the 1970s by focusing on what was known about individual genetic disorders. Five decades later, their infrastructure had become an edifice for prevention, allowing expectant parents to test prenatally for hundreds of disease-specific mutations using powerful genetic testing platforms. In this book, Andrew J. Hogan explores how various diseases were “made genetic” after 1960, with the long-term aim of treating and curing them using gene therapy. In the process, he explains, these disorders were located in the human genome and became targets for prenatal prevention, while the ongoing promise of gene therapy remained on the distant horizon. In narrating the history of research that contributed to diagnostic genetic medicine, Hogan describes the expanding scope of prenatal diagnosis and prevention. He draws on case studies of Prader-Willi, fragile X, DiGeorge, and velo-cardio-facial syndromes to illustrate that almost all testing in medical genetics is inseparable from the larger—and increasingly “big data”–oriented—aims of biomedical research. Hogan also reveals how contemporary genetic testing infrastructure reflects an intense collaboration among cytogeneticists, molecular biologists, and doctors specializing in human malformation. Hogan critiques the modern ideology of genetic prevention, which suggests all pregnancies are at risk for genetic disease and should be subject to extensive genomic screening. He examines the dilemmas and ethics of the use of prenatal diagnostic information in an era when medical geneticists and biotechnology companies offer whole genome prenatal screening—essentially searching for any disease-causing mutation. Hogan’s analysis is animated by ongoing scientific and scholarly debates about the extent to which the preventive focus in contemporary medical genetics resembles the aims of earlier eugenicists. Written for historians, sociologists, and anthropologists of science and medicine, as well as bioethics scholars, physicians, geneticists, and families affected by genetic conditions, Life Histories of Genetic Disease is a profound exploration of the scientific culture surrounding malformation and mutation.

Author : Stephen Pemberton
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421404427
Total Pages : 399 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Bleeding Disease written by Stephen Pemberton and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2011-07-15 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the 1970s, a therapeutic revolution, decades in the making, had transformed hemophilia from an obscure hereditary malady into a manageable bleeding disorder. Yet the glory of this achievement was short lived. The same treatments that delivered some normalcy to the lives of persons with hemophilia brought unexpectedly fatal results in the 1980s when people with the disease contracted HIV-AIDS and Hepatitis C in staggering numbers. The Bleeding Disease recounts the promising and perilous history of American medical and social efforts to manage hemophilia in the twentieth century. This is both a success story and a cautionary tale, one built on the emergence in the 1950s and 1960s of an advocacy movement that sought normalcy—rather than social isolation and hyper-protectiveness—for the boys and men who suffered from the severest form of the disease. Stephen Pemberton evokes the allure of normalcy as well as the human costs of medical and technological progress in efforts to manage hemophilia. He explains how physicians, advocacy groups, the blood industry, and the government joined patients and families in their unrelenting pursuit of normalcy—and the devastating, unintended consequences that pursuit entailed. Ironically, transforming the hope of a normal life into a purchasable commodity for people with bleeding disorders made it all too easy to ignore the potential dangers of delivering greater health and autonomy to hemophilic boys and men.

Author : Karl H. Muench
Publisher : McGraw-Hill/Appleton & Lange
ISBN 13 : 9780838531211
Total Pages : 399 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Genetic Medicine written by Karl H. Muench and published by McGraw-Hill/Appleton & Lange. This book was released on 1987-12-01 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Nathaniel Comfort
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300188870
Total Pages : 371 pages
Book Rating : 4.75/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Science of Human Perfection written by Nathaniel Comfort and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-25 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Almost daily we hear news stories, advertisements, and scientific reports that promise genetic medicine will make us live longer, enable doctors to identify and treat diseases before they start, and individualize our medical care. But surprisingly, a century ago eugenicists were making the same promises. The Science of Human Perfection traces the history of the promises of medical genetics and of the medical dimension of eugenics. The book also considers social and ethical issues that cast troublesome shadows over these fields./divDIV DIVKeeping his focus on America, science historian Nathaniel Comfort introduces the community of scientists, physicians, and public health workers who have contributed to the development of medical genetics from the nineteenth century to today. He argues that medical genetics is closely related to eugenics, and indeed the two cannot be fully understood separately. He also carefully examines how the desire to relieve suffering and to improve ourselves genetically, though noble, may be subverted. History makes clear that as patients and consumers we must take ownership of genetic medicine, using it intelligently, knowledgeably, and skeptically, lest pernicious interests trump our own./div

Author : Barton Childs
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 0801861306
Total Pages : 345 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Genetic Medicine written by Barton Childs and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 1999-08-03 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Highly recommended for a wide variety of audiences in addition to physicians and medical students... Fortunately, some of Childs's concepts are being applied to medical teaching already, but I know of no better synthesis in one book." -- Perspectives in Biology and Medicine