Spaces and networks of genetic knowledge making: the ‘geneticisation’ of heart disease

The ‘geneticisation’ of health, medicine and the body is extending from single-gene to multi-factorial conditions such as heart disease. Adopting ‘Actor Network Theory’, the paper argues that the making of genetic knowledge occurs in spaces and networks where contested knowledges necessarily produce a geneticisation that is neither certain nor complete. Drawing on empirical research in a coronary care unit in Glasgow, Scotland, the paper sets out the network of consultants, rehabilitation nurses and people with heart disease and others who collectively, through contestation and the marshalling of knowledges by prominent social actors, produce an understanding of the role of genes in heart disease.