Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that Precision Medicine promises a molecularly based openness affecting our identities in unprecedented ways. Can precision medicine be transformed into more emancipatory and empowering self-techniques? (Foucault 1986)

Paper long abstract:

The Precision Medicine Initiative (Obama administration 2015) is a broad research collaboration which focuses on individual data to build an healthcare scheme that will take into account genes, environment, and life style. The promise to address a more individual understanding of health and disease targets 'molecular' traits more specifically. Despite disclaimers that 'precision' does not mean patient-centered care, 'precision' is suggestive to being personalized; this paper investigates precision medicine in its relation to the individual.

This paper argues that Precision Medicine forms a new space of knowledge that builds on its predecessors 'Laboratory Medicine' (Jewson 1976) and 'Surveillance Medicine' (Armstrong 1995). The combination of scientistic and molecularised medicine on the one hand and broad population studies on the other, is what makes precision medicine such a powerful framework. Laboratory knowledge is represented through its space of illness 'outside the body'; underneath the microscope, while population studies are defined in terms of risk, that adds a temporal axis. These two characteristics create the opportunity to think of oneself in new terms, a molecularly based openness affecting our identities in unprecedented ways, which is new and in need of philosophical reflection. Foucault is used to understand these new knowledge practices. Although Precision Medicine may serve to shape conduct of the individual because it opens up the self for scrutiny by others, it is also opened up to self-scrutiny. The individual may transform precision medicine into more emancipatory and empowering self-techniques. (Foucault 1986)