1,720,974 research outputs found
Constructing and fracturing alliances : actant stories and the Australian xenotransplantation network
No full textXenotransplantation (XTP; animal-to-human transplantation) is a controversial technology of contemporary scientific, medical, ethical and social debate in Australia and internationally. The complexities of XTP encompass immunology, immunosuppression, physiology, technology (genetic engineering and cloning), microbiology, and animal/human relations. As a result of these controversies, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), Australia, formed the Xenotransplantation Working Party (XWP) in 2001. The XWP was designed to advise the NHMRC on XTP, if and how it should proceed in Australia, and to provide draft regulatory guidelines. During the period 2001-2004, the XWP produced three publicly available documents one of which, ‘Animal-to-Human Transplantation Research: A Guide for the Community’ (2003), was specifically designed to introduce the general public to the major issues and background of XTP. This thesis examines XTP in Australia as guided and influenced by this community document. Explicitly, drawing upon actor (actant)- network theory, I will reveal the Australian XTP network and explore, describe and explain XTP problematisations and network negotiations by the enrolled actants on two key concepts and obligatory passage points - animals and risk. These actants include those providing regulatory advice (members of the XWP and the associated Animal Issues Subcommittee), those developing and/or critiquing XTP (official science and scientists), and those targeted by the technology (people on dialysis, with Type-1 diabetes, Huntington’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, pre-or post-human-tohuman transplantation, and their partner/spouse). The stories are gathered through focus groups, semi-structured interviews and document analysis. They reveal ambiguous and sometimes contradictory stories about animals and risk, which influence and impact the problematisations of XTP and its networks. Therefore, XTP mobilises tension; facilitating both support and apprehension of the XTP network and its construction by both the sciences and the publics
Informed Consent and Human Rights: Some Regulatory Challenges of Xenotransplantation
No full textIn contemporary Western society, technoscience plays an important and influential role. This is not to say that it always brings positive results, as negative outcomes can and do result. The rate of technoscientific change can also stimulate considerable ethical questions and moral dilemmas about the direction of society, and social change in general. In this article, I explore how one particular technoscientific development, xenotransplantation (animal-to-human transplantation), poses significant and often conflicting challenges to traditional conceptions and understandings of informed consent and human rights. While the main focus is placed on Australia, this article also points to the difficulties of State sovereignty in a globalised world. That is to say, the negative consequences of xenotransplantation are not necessarily restricted to geopolitical boundaries, as the decision of one to proceed could potentially affect the many
The Modernistic Posthuman Prophecy of Donna Haraway
No full textDonna Haraway’s (1991) vision of a post-gender cyborg has (re)sparked feminist interest in reclaiming patriarchal technological tools as a source of liberation from gender oppression. These utopian, cyborgian dreams of the dissolution of body and gender dualisms however, are flawed. This failing is founded on Haraway’s underestimation of the gender-influenced relationship between: the historical legacies of the cyborg; linguistic metaphors and symbols; and the lived subjective technological experiences of embodied materiality. Consequently, despite Haraway’s fantastical claims of the cyborg being able to transgress traditional hierarchical bodily-based binaries, this cyborg vision is distinctly modern in a nostalgic, linear, and utopian construction. As a result, these idealistic cyborg visions can be linked paradoxically to patriarchal discourses; the Cartesian philosophies of Christian religion; and the posthuman prophetical desires of the Extropian transhuman collective (Extropy Institute, 2003a, 2003b; More, 2003), such as featured in the works of Hans Moravec (1988) and Kevin Warwick (2002)
Science Stories: Selecting the Source Animal for Xenotransplantation
No full textXenotransplantation (animal-to-human transplantation) involves implanting, infusing or transplanting living animal tissues, cells or organs into a human recipient. The aim is to alleviate or eliminate human health conditions that prevent the individual from living the 'good life'. Hence, xenotransplantation is constructed as a potential and needed solution to fixing 'abnormal' bodies. By crossing species barriers, however, this technology is not without its complexities and uncertainties. Importantly, xenotransplantation intimately intertwines animals and humans, which may challenge sacred boundaries such as animal/human, subject/object and us/them, while posing new questions about ontology.\ud
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To deal with such complexities and potential hybridities, official science attempts to stabilise constructed knowledges of animals. This primarily targets knowledges on animals of interest as human organ sources, specifically nonhuman primates and pigs. Ironically, this approach also involves complicating our understandings of the concordance and discordance between nonhuman primates, pigs and humans. Utilising Irwin and Michael's (2003) ethno-epistemic assemblages, I explore how official science selects an animal as an organ source for humans. By employing what I have called a comparative continuum, it is revealed how official science fashions animal identities on degrees of dissimilarities and similarities to humans, and how, through such negotiations, official science constructs its position of authority. This reveals how official science creates complex and sometimes contradictory truth-claims and stories about nonhuman primates and pigs
What is health and medical tourism?
No full textDespite increasing social, economic and political interest in the growing global marketplace of health and medical tourism, it remains relatively unexamined in sociological and tourism literature. In this paper, I seek to understand health and medical tourism by briefly exploring its history, varying definitions, and contemporary developments. This highlights how health and medical tourism is a subjective practice and embodied experience which, due to increasing options available to tourists, is difficult to classify. Furthermore, as health and medical tourism involves an active body that is not restricted by time and place, it challenges traditional sociological understandings of tourism, which classify tourism as a passive, escapist and leisurely activity that occurs over ‘there’ in contrast to ‘here’
Engineering the fitness of older patients for chemotherapy : an exploration of Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment in practice
No full textClinicians often report that currently available methods to assess older patients, including standard clinical consultations, do not elicit the information necessary to make an appropriate cancer treatment recommendation for older cancer patients. An increasingly popular way of assessing the potential of older patients to cope with chemotherapy is a Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment. What constitutes Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment, however, is open to interpretation and varies from one setting to another. Furthermore, Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment’s usefulness as a predictor of fitness for chemotherapy and as a determinant of actual treatment is not well understood. In this article, we analyse how Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment was developed for use in a large cancer service in an Australian capital city. Drawing upon Actor–Network Theory, our findings reveal how, during its development, Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment was made both a tool and a science. Furthermore, we briefly explore the tensions that we experienced as scholars who analyse medico-scientific practices and as practitioner–designers charged with improving the very tools we critique. Our study contributes towards geriatric oncology by scrutinising the medicalisation of ageing, unravelling the practices of standardisation and illuminating the multiplicity of ‘fitness for chemotherapy’
A delicate balance: negotiating renal transplantation, immunosuppression and adherence to medical regimen
Full text linkDespite the volume of biomedical and psychosocial discourse
surrounding both renal transplantation and the immune system, there is a limit
to current understandings of immunosuppression in the context of kidney
transplantation. For example, we do not know how the immunosuppressed
renal transplant recipient experiences and understands their immune system
and body. In addition, we do not know if the patient is as fi xated on 'graft
survival' as their healthcare team or whether other concerns are more relevant.
What is missing is the discourse of those who actually 'live' the medically
altered immune system in the context of renal transplantation.
We propose that this gap in knowledge is bound to an acknowledged problem
among renal transplant recipients and their healthcare teams – a lack of
compliance with recommended medical regimens. Our argument here is that
an exploration of patient intimacy with transplant-related immunosuppression
might illuminate a different understanding of this experience that could
enhance health professionals' understanding and their subsequent approach
to treatment. We contend that the embodied and contextual experience of the
patient needs to be equally valued in order to enhance patient outcomes
Xenotourism and Xenotravel: Some notes on global regulation
No full textA Mexican treatment centre currently offers to transplant insulin-producing (islet) cells into people with Type-1 diabetes. The transplantation material is sourced from 'clean' laboratory pigs in an attempt to enable the human patient to produce insulin internally. Using this example, our paper investigates three issues:- 1) The geographical location of this procedure and responses from other parts of world tell us much about technology as a global/local process. We examine to what extent Mexico is understood as an (in)appropriate venue for such a dangerous procedure, and how tropes of global regulation can be used to inhibit or advance technoscientific procedures. 2) Patient compliance has long been a difficult issue for the medical profession. Xenotransplantation is particularly problematic in this regard; not only are there risks for the individual patient, but also there are concerns about trans-species retroviruses against which humans have no known protection. Individual patients are required to balance the compulsion that they manage their health as responsible neo-liberal citizens with the necessity to avoid epidemics. We examine responses to this treatment that oscillate between calls for individual freedom and global regulation. 3) We examine the extent to which medical treatments are increasingly commodified (or connected to leisure broadly conceived). We analyse Mexican xenotransplantation as an example of 'medical tourism', where explicit links are established between medical procedures, holidays, accommodation and other tourist consumption experiences
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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