Personalised Medicine, Individual Choice and the Common Good

Britta van Beers, Sigrid Sterckx, Donna Dickenson

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781108473910
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108578394
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Hippocrates famously advised doctors 'it is far more important to know what person the disease has than what disease the person has'. Yet 2,500 years later, 'personalised medicine', based on individual genetic profiling and the achievements of genomic research, claims to be revolutionary. In this book, experts from a wide range of disciplines critically examine this claim. They expand the discussion of personalised medicine beyond its usual scope to include many other highly topical issues, including: human nuclear genome transfer ('three-parent IVF'), stem cell-derived gametes, private umbilical cord blood banking, international trade in human organs, biobanks such as the US Precision Medicine Initiative, direct-to-consumer genetic testing, health and fitness self-monitoring. Although these technologies often prioritise individual choice, the original ideal of genomic research saw the human genome as 'the common heritage of humanity'. The authors question whether personalised medicine actually threatens this conception of the common good.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Personalised Medicine and the Politics of Human Nuclear Genome Transfer
• 3 Stem Cell-Derived Gametes and Uterus Transplants: Hurray for the End of Third-Party Reproduction! Or Not?
• 4 Personalising Future Health Risk through ‘Biological Insurance’: Proliferation of Private Umbilical Cord Blood Banking in India
• 5 Combating the Trade in Organs: Why We Should Preserve the Communal Nature of Organ Transplantation
• 6 When There Is No Cure: Challenges for Collective Approaches to Alzheimer’s Disease
• 7 Lost and Found: Relocating the Individual in the Age of Intensified Data Sourcing in European Healthcare
• 8 Presuming the Promotion of the Common Good by Large-Scale Health Research: The Cases of care.data 2.0 and the 100,000 Genomes Project in the UK
• 9 My Genome, My Right
• 10 ‘The Best Me I Can Possibly Be’: Legal Subjectivity, Self-Authorship and Wrongful Life Actions in an Age of ‘Genomic Torts’
• 11 I Run, You Run, We Run: A Philosophical Approach to Health and Fitness Apps
• 12 The Molecularised Me: Psychoanalysing Personalised Medicine and Self-Tracking
• Bibliography
• Index