Conclusion

Abstract

The practices explored in this book suggest a diverse number of cultural arenas, encompassed by and which connect to breast cancer, offer a particularly potent ‘social form’ (Rabinow 1999: 89) for the development and legitimisation of new genetic knowledge. As Margaret Lock points out the emergence of predictive genetic testing for breast cancer is in many ways a striking case of the way that ‘possible probabilities, based on poorly constructed studies, have been constructed into certain probabilities and then into certainties’ (1998: 8). In examining how genetic knowledge associated with the BRCA genes is being translated, received and acted upon at the interface between different sciences and publics, this account demonstrates how the efforts to secure and maintain the ‘legitimacy’ of breast cancer genetics must be positioned as a collective endeavour. In fact the circuits of action and practice which link, differently situated ‘publics’ and ‘sciences’ in the coproduction of ‘new’ genetic knowledge and technology operate like Martin’s figure of the rhizome, in ‘discontinuous, fractured and nonlinear ways’ (1998:31).