Mishra, Amrita | India

With a decade-long interest in the sociology of science and technology, Amrita Mishra has chosen to examine the significance of research on biomarkers for the detection of risk of malignancies of the cervix. Her project investigates the possibility of a shift from diagnostics to pre-diagnostics in the case of gynecological cancers globally and also in the Indian context.

Amrita’s involvement with STS began with an M.Phil seminar course on the sociology of science and technology. This course formed part of the curriculum of the M.Phil Programme that she completed at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi in 1998. Her first foray into STS writing was an interrogation of Bruno Latour’s constructivist approach to the sociology of scientific knowledge. She went on to write an M.Phil dissertation which was ‘A sociological analysis of certain aspects of the Human Genome Project'.
In 2008, Amrita succcessfully defended her doctoral research at JNU, India.

Her thesis, ‘Power, Authority, and Capital in the Laboratory: A Study of Elites and Modes of Association in Science’ is grounded in the sociology of scientific knowledge. Taking the ethnographic instance, of an Indian life science laboratory it examines acts of control and relations of force in the laboratory. These acts are co-productive with the narratives of ‘unplaced’ research work that generate transversal epistemic distinction. The thesis interrogates the notion of laboratory placelessness by examining the restriction constitutive of research in three areas: the regulation of the work force, the practices of nomination for paper authorship, and the spatio-temporal restrictions of research sites.

Amrita has been awarded research fellowships by the Indian Council of Medical Research and the University Grants Commission of India. Her current research at IAS-STS is funded by the Österreichischer Austauschdienst. The ethnographic work on which her thesis is based is slated for publication in Contested Categories, an edited volume of papers prepared by researchers at the Medical Museion, Copenhagen.

Project at IAS-STS: Biomarkers for cervical cancers: Discourses of risk and gender in gynecological diagnostics

Biomarkers are defined as quantifiable indicators of changes in organisms at the molecular or cellular level. These are now presented as highly useful in understanding environmental exposures that might be implicated in disease. They are also believed to be useful in predicting the onset or course of disease, to improve the process of risk assessment. Amrita’s project is a sociological examination of research on biomarkers for the precise diagnosis of the onset of cervical malignancy.

The PhD fieldwork provided Amrita with the questions that drive her project at IAS-STS. One of the important initiatives in the laboratory of fieldwork was the development of biomarkers for diagnostic use in precisely detecting the rise of a risk indicating possible cervical malignancy. The proposed use of these markers is to be in better distinguishing the lesions caused by Human Papillomavirus infection from the initial stages of actual cervical carcinoma. Candidate molecules such as p53, bc12, NF-κΒp50, p65, IκΒα and c-fos were being considered in this regard. The anomalous fluctuations of these molecules in the individuals to be screened might facilitate the reading of these molecular counts as indices of risk.

It would seem that focus on biomarkers is hailed as a significant improvement over older diagnostic tools. Just as the physician’s gaze on the solidity of the patient’s body is no longer quite adequate in contemporary biomedical regimes, so also the histopathologist’s gaze on tissue samples on slides is seen as inadequate, idiosyncratic, and prone to artefactuality. For ‘de-subjectivised’ precision, the biomedical gaze moves steadily ‘inwards’ into the molecular interactions to which are attributed individual propensities to disease.

The focus on molecular pre-diagnostics for cancer is linked to discourses of individual ‘responsibilization.’ In speaking of greater or lesser susceptibility to disease, one speaks of transitions and progressions between lower and higher risk. Risk discourse has woven itself around cancer and laden it with a burden of metaphorized dread that translates into the world-wide biomedical pursuit of answers about this disease. Biomedical questions and answers may be moving from the domain of diagnosis and therapy to pre-cancerous detection, to stringent pre-emption of oncological danger. These discursive shifts are co-productive with new articulations and barriers between the biomedical research laboratory, the pathology laboratory, the clinical site, and the patient. Amrita will simultaneously investigate these shifts and address questions of risk and gender in gynecological diagnostics.