Review of Joan M. Fujimura, Crafting Science: A Socio-History of the Quest for the Genetics of Cancer

This is a bloodless book, literally and figuratively. It is bloodless in the sense that it excludes from its frame the cancer patients whose blood and tumors are the central physical materials of the high technoscience described here. And it is bloodless in the sense that it deals with a pressing moral issue—how some forms of cancer research become public and scientific priorities—without a moral perspective. This divorce from human need and vulnerability necessarily precludes consideration of the book as a work of history.