Anticipating Prevention: Constituting Clinical Need, Rights and Resources in Brazilian Cancer Genetics

This chapter examines how, in the context of Brazilian cancer genetics, research becomes caught up with constituting clinical need, rights and care. It explores the uneven and disjunctured ways that research on cancer genetics in Brazil is framed and reproduced as a resource. I show how patients and practitioners engage with and are constituted by predictive and risk-reducing interventions resulting in diverse forms of patient/professional activism. My goal is to shed light on the sociocultural dynamics and tensions by which prevention, public health and clinical need are being calibrated at the meeting points interstices between global cancer genetic research, the limits of public health as well as its pursuit as a national imperative and the rising incidence of cancer in Brazil. In this way I illustrate how global research trajectories, propelled in part through an emphasis on genomics as a form of preventative public health, inform local clinical practice at the same time that inequities in the Brazilian health care system comprise and propel the pursuit of cancer genetics as both a right to health care and a resource for research.