The Impact of a Fantasy

Abstract

AbstractPersonalized medicine is a sociotechnical imaginary: a collective vision for the coproduction of a future science, technology and society. This vision has long historical roots but is also the result of a specific context with ongoing changes in society, including the political economy of science. Part of this vision is a fantasy that runs counter to current scientific understanding of illness and disease. One may argue against such fantasies by appealing to facts. Such arguments tend to prove ineffective. If we can explain why they are ineffective this might shed light on possible implications of this state of affair. In this chapter, I draw on Rayner’s concept of “socially constructed ignorance” to indicate the non-modern character of the beliefs in fantasies of personalized medicine, while at the same time personalized medicine is yet another attempt to realize the Cartesian dream. Antonio Gramsci (Lettere dal carcere. Torino: Einaudi. English edition: Gramsci, A. 2011. Prison notebooks, Vol. I. Columbia University Press, New York, 1947) famously wrote: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Is the Cartesian dream coming to its end, with personalized medicine as a morbid symptom, a reductio ad absurdum? If so, what it the new that cannot be born?