Paper short abstract:

The paper examines notions of speculative well-being and imagined futures in the research on genomic medicine in India.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I compare two different research projects underway at the National Institute of Biogenomic Medicine, India to understand the speculative hope vested in genomic medicine. While the first project takes the diversity of a local population to understand the complex interaction between genetic and epigenetic factors in the overall incidence of disease, the second centres around a single condition (oral cancer) and is part of the International Cancer Genome Consortium. The two projects may share a common understanding of genetic variation as a marker of 'stability' and 'instability' as outlined in the panel abstract, they are nevertheless underpinned by different conceptions of the relationship between population, predictive medicine, and health. Through these research projects, the paper examines notions of speculative well-being and imagined futures that are marshaled to accelerate wider adoption of genomic medicine.