Regimes of value in the development of genetic tests, 1960 to the present

• In Event: Bioeconomies - Life, Technologies, and Capital in the 21st Century II: The Reproductive Bioeconomy

Abstract

Diagnostic and predictive testing for genetic factors in health and illness has expanded enormously since the 1960s, both in volume and in the range of medical uses it. Over the same period, the production and delivery of genetic and other diagnostic tests has increasingly been taken over by commercial companies, with some tests now enjoying sales that place them in the blockbuster category alongside pharmaceuticals. Yet the growth of the diagnostics sector has received nothing like the scholarly scrutiny that has been devoted to the pharmaceutical sector. This paper makes a foray into this neglected field by asking what kinds of value – including but not confined to market value – genetic tests have delivered since the 1960s.

The paper offers an overview of developments in Britain and Europe, based on historical examination of mostly published sources and grey literature. It analyses the findings using the concept of “regimes of value” (Appadurai) to sketch a history of how genetic tests have been endowed with value by changing configurations of patients, clinicians, biomedical researchers, public health practitioners, commercial investors and government policy makers among others in the decades since 1960. Specifically, it asks how these different constituencies have valued the power of genetic testing technologies to discriminate between different biomedical conditions and predispositions. In so doing, it aims to illuminate the sociocultural factors that encouraged the development of ever more discriminatory genetic testing technologies, including the growth of commercial and political interest in the economic value that such technologies could deliver.

Author

• Steve Sturdy