Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. Venture scientists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century have embraced personalized medicine, aiming to realize economic value from the science of genomics and its application to medical research and practice. In this context, personalized medicine also encapsulates both the excesses of promissory science and the inevitable disappointments and disputes that follow. Personalized medicine is therefore an appealing yet ambiguous and contested term and is as such an ideal one for engaging with the claims and counterclaims about the value of genomics to biomedicine. The book relates there is a history to personalized medicine which predates that of genomics. The concept of the imaginary has been used increasingly within the fields of science studies and the sociology and anthropology of science over the past 20 years, drawing on a number of different intellectual traditions from political theory to psychoanalysis.