Paper short abstract:

The paper explores medical evidence on gene therapy as means of politicizing patient expectations and hopes regarding therapeutic finality. By being disseminated into an infrastructure of institutional heterogeneity (techno-collectivities), medical evidence acquires political relevance and potency.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on gene therapy and explores its connection to the politics of thalassaemia in Cyprus. Gene therapy utilizes the manipulation and insertion of viral vectors in the human organism as means to transmit and replace pathological genes with therapeutic ones. The medical technology in question is still in an experimental stage yet, if successful, carries the potential of providing a permanent cure for thalassaemia patients around the world. Gene therapy has an ambivalent relationship with medical evidence. First speculated in the early 70s, and after several clinical trials met by dead ends, gene therapy's originally messianic promise subsided in the 1990s through the early 2000s, only to recently resurface as imminent "reality". Using ethnographic research conducted with a thalassaemia patients association, and thinking through anthropological literature on expectation, imagination and hope, the paper situates the intensifying medical evidence surrounding the potential actualization of gene therapy in the wider political context of governmental decision making and patient activism in Cyprus. I make the case that medical evidence acquires political relevance and potency insofar it is disseminated into an institutional infrastructure of heterogeneous actors (techno-collectivities), capable of upholding patient expectations and hopes of techno-therapeutic finality as issues of collective concern, to be deliberated and contested by many.