ABSTRACT
This response addresses the claim in this volume that the concept of medical materiality is inherently biosocial. Borrowing from long-term ethnographic research on Breast Cancer (BRCA) genes, the response briefly considers the uses and consequences of applying a medical materiality framework to BRCA genes and the objects that lay within their social world. While the biological concept of the ‘gene’ increasingly becomes less stable as biomedical research ever emerges, the materiality of these objects continues to be productive of social worlds and cultural practice. Because new knowledge within biosciences, and especially within fields of epigenetics, beg for important research into the ecological and social partnerships between people, their bodies, and the material world, this response argues, finally, that how we engage and think with the material affordances of the biological and environmental is of critical significance.
