The(unruly) complexity of carcinogenicity, or, how Helicobacter pylori 'causes' cancer

João Arriscado Nunes
Center for Social Studies, University of Coimbra

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     Last modified: June 15, 2005
     Presentation date: 07/14/2005 9:15 AM in MACK 236
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Abstract
In 1994, the Working Group on the Evaluation of Carcinogenic Risks to Humans of the WHO affiliated International Agency for Cancer Research issued a report defining Helicobacter pylori (H.p.) - the bacteria identified in the early 1980s as a causal agent in several diseases of the gastric tract - as a type I carcinogen. A further step had thus been taken in the controversial history of H.p, which became the first bacteria to be declared a carcinogen - and one of the most severe kind. But what does it mean to declare a bacteria a causal factor of gastric carcinoma or of MALT-lymphoma? How does cancer become a “long term consequence” of H.p. infection?
This paper explores the ways in which researchers, pathologists and clinicians deal with the “unruly” complexity of the paths from bacterial infection to cancer, how they describe, reduce and manage this complexity through a range of practices associated with what Keating and Cambrosio describe as different biomedical platforms. This exploration draws on a range of materials and approaches, including published materials on research on H.p. and on gastric carcinoma, guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of H.p. infection, interviews with researchers and practitioners and the record of a long term ethnographic study of research on gastric pathologies and, in particular, gastric carcinoma. Beyond the specificity of this case, the study suggests a more general approach to the investigation of the “grammars of complexity” as they are put to work in the life and biomedical sciences.

Multiple Paper Session:
Other papers in this session:
Life course origins of chronic diseases: How to reconcile the contributions of competing epidemiological approaches
Scale Shifts, Complexities and Comprehensive Knowledge: Exploring the Construction of the "Aging Erythrocyte" as a Biomedical Object