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Nº 2 novembro de 2013 Biographies of Objects and Narratives of Discovery in the Biomedical Sciences
Autores: João Arriscado Nunes, Tiago Santos Pereira, Oriana Brás e Ana Raquel Matos |
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Abstract: The story of Helicobacter pylori provides a fascinating case of what the science historian Lorraine Daston calls “ontologies in motion” and of how a living organism, in this case a bacterium, is constituted as a biomedical entity and thus endowed with a history and a biography through the mutual engagement of humans (researchers, clinicians, patients...) and microorganisms. Against conventional notions of scientific entities as the outcome of a process of discovery, of laying bare the hidden existence or attributes of once and for all, fully constituted, unchanging entities, the field of science studies has brought these entities back into life, as entities existing through the changing web of attachments to other living entities, including human organisms, and to the scientific and clinical practices which address and question them through the deployment of a range of apparatuses and of actions bringing together the human and the non-human, the biological and the technological, in order to generate novel creatures endowed with previously unknown or unsuspected capacities. |