1 - Diagnostic liquidity

Summary

“Information is, at the end of the day, the coin of the genomics realm.”

In June 1997, the French genomics firm Genset announced a collaboration with the psychopathology department of a public hospital in Buenos Aires to collect and map the DNA of patients suffering from bipolar disorder. The genes or markers linked to susceptibility to bipolar disorder, if found, were to be patented by Genset as part of its strategy to enter into partnerships with major pharmaceutical companies for the development of new diagnostic and therapeutic technologies. This gene hunt was significant in its institutional form, as well as in its potential implications for the reconfiguration of knowledge about mental illness. As an alliance between genomics and psychiatry across continents, and between public and private institutions, it represented a new type of assemblage oriented toward the understanding and regulation of human behavior. The central problem it raised – both practical and epistemological – concerned the potential universality of genomic knowledge about mental disorder.

The success of the company's gene-hunting effort hinged on the global validity of a standards regime designed to commensurate divergent illness experience into a common classificatory scheme. Such commensuration, it was hoped, would enable psychiatric illness to be coded as genomic information, and would thus make the illness experience of Argentine patients convertible with that of patients in other parts of the world.