Advanced Search

Journal Navigation

Journal Home

Subscriptions

Archive

Contact Us

Table of Contents

CiteULike is a free service for managing and discovering scholarly references - click here to get started.

Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
Public Understanding of Science
This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow References
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to Saved Citations
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Request Reprints
Right arrow Add to My Marked Citations
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Right arrow Citing Articles via Scopus
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Lundin, S.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Complore   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us   Add to Digg   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati   Add to Twitter  
What's this?

Creating identity with biotechnology: the xenotransplanted body as the norm

Susanne Lundin

Department of European Ethnology, Finngatan 8, SE-22362 Lund, Sweden, susanne.lundin{at}etn.lu.se

One of today's great issues is how an advanced medical technology like xenotransplantation should be applied. It is well known that medicine brings not only potential but also risk. On the cultural level, xenotransplantations are equally complicated; they arouse thoughts about whether our outlook on humanity will be influenced now that modern techniques can "correct" our defective bodies. The article asks whether xenotransplantation creates new cultural meanings. That is, how do newly emerging ideas of a technologically created normality raise a set of moral questions about nature and culture, mind and body? The discussion is based on interview studies with patients suffering from diabetes and Parkinson's disease. The former have been given porcine islets, while the others have had human fetal cells transplanted into the brain; the latter are also potential recipients of xenotransplants. This empirical material becomes the basis for discussing how diseases can lead to a crisis in which it is essential—on a concrete, everyday level—to find strategies for dealing with the consequences. In this process of identity and normalization, advanced biomedicine is an important factor.

Public Understanding of Science, Vol. 11, No. 4, 333-345 (2002)
DOI: 10.1088/0963-6625/11/4/302
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati   Add to Twitter Twitter    What's this?