ABSTRACT
The ubiquitous promise of personalized medicine associated with developments in genetic research, including the field known as breast cancer genetics, has long been grounded in an assumption that this knowledge will facilitate the movement towards individualized and targeted treatment based on knowing a person’s genotype. Despite emerging possibilities for using knowledge of the two well-known inherited susceptibly genes, BRCA 1 and 2, in the treatment of sporadic cancers (see Bourrett, Keating & Cambrosio, 2014), this promise has been limited for the most part to the possibility of providing a personalized risk susceptibility estimate based on genetic testing to detect mutations on these genes. The normalization of the anticipatory habitus (Joseph, 2014) associated with predictive interventions related to new fields of clinical intervention such as breast cancer genetics is reflected in the growing incorporation of genetic testing for breast cancer as a standard of care across diverse fields of public and private health care, particularly in North America and Europe (see Gibbon et al., 2014). The announcement in 2013 by actress Angelina Jolie that she had undergone a prophylactic mastectomy following a positive result for a mutation on the BRCA genes provides a striking and very public example of this rationality in action, which as this chapter will illustrate, continues to have repercussions in many diverse cultural contexts, indirectly and directly informing the expansion of predictive interventions for cancer. 1
