The de-formed body between diagnostic culture and “geneticization” of medicine.

Abstract

In the United States, the traditional anthropological and ontological conception of corporeity, inherited from the European continent, is gradually undergoing a deep and radical transformation, which is manifesting itself in the social approval of bio-medical practices of intervention and manipulation of reproduction and prenatal life, as artificial fertilization, cloning, genetic diagnosis and genetic therapy. Those practices, far from bringing to effective results for the cure of the innumerable diseases which still affect humanity, contribute to modify the relationship of modern man with his corporeity, and with the concepts of health, illness, procreation and family.

In particular, within the many bio-medical possibilities of genetics, the prenatal diagnosis of congenital malformations has become a “routine” practice, which has modified the relationship of the woman with her motherhood and her desired child. The consequences of this transformation are not always positive, especially in a socio-cultural dimension ruled by the anthropological imagine of a biologically and genetically perfect corporeity, functional, and fully answering to the needs induced by our productive society. The American scientific literature underlines this phenomenon, which in epistemological and cultural terms is influencing the concepts of “normal”, “illness”, “quality of life”, and is opening the way to an “eugenics” and selective medicine for the genetically defective individuals.

So, genetics becomes the lens through which we observe man, the powerful instrument that reduces the individual to his genes, to his defective genes. Therefore, in this contest, it is fundamental to bring to light the conscience of the ethical dimension of diagnostic knowledge, to lead the scientist through the difficult battle against genetic diseases, in the full consciousness of the inestimable value of each human existence, even if ill and suffering.