Gil Eyal is Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. He is the author, most recently, of (with Dan Navon) “Looping Genomes: Diagnostic Change and the Genetic Makeup of the Autism Population.” AJS 121, 5 (March 2016): 1416–71; and of “For a Sociology of Expertise: The Social Origins of the Autism Epidemic,” AJS Vol. 118, No. 4 (January 2013), pp. 863-907. His most recent book is The Autism Matrix. (Polity Press, 2010)." Previous books include: The Origins of Post-Communist Elites: From the Prague Spring to the Breakup of Czechoslovakia. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003 and The Disenchantment of the Orient. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).
Presentation Abstract
What are likely to be the looping effects of 'personalized' (or 'precision') medicine
One of the key dimensions of personalized (or precision) medicine is preference for a gene-first, new taxonomy of human diseases that would replace the old, symptoms-based classification. As Ian Hacking has argued, the human kinds named by symptom-based diagnostic classifications are often involved in a “looping” dynamic in which people react in various ways to being classified so that the classifications have to be constantly revised and become “moving targets”. Would this dynamic disappear if a new, “precise”, gene-first system of classification emerges? To address this question, I report the results of research on the relations between autism (an “old”, symptom-based classification) and “gene-first” syndromes - i.e. conditions that are delineated and diagnosed strictly according to genetic mutations like Fragile X or 22q13 deletion syndrome. These gene-first conditions provide a glimpse into the looping dynamics of precision