Biomedical Platforms

Since the end of World War II, biology and medicine have merged in remarkably
productive ways. In this book Peter Keating and Alberto Cambrosio analyze the transformation of
medicine into biomedicine and its consequences, ranging from the recasting of hospital architecture
to the redefinition of the human body, disease, and therapeutic practices. To describe this new
alignment between the normal and the pathological, the authors introduce the notion of the
biomedical platform. Defined as a specific configuration of instruments, individuals, and programs,
biomedical platforms generate routines, entities, and activities, held together by standard reagents
and protocols. Biological entities such as cell surface markers, oncogenes, and DNA profiles now
exist as both normal biological components of the organism and as pathological signs -- that is, as
biomedical substances. The notion of a biomedical platform allows researchers interested in the
development of contemporary medicine to describe events and processes overlooked by other
approaches.The authors focus on a specific biomedical platform known as immunophenotyping. They
describe its emergence as an experimental system with roots in biology (immunology) and pathology
(oncology). They recount how this experimental system was transformed into a biomedical platform
initially for the diagnosis of leukemia and subsequently for other diseases such as AIDS. Through
this case study, they show that a biomedical platform is the bench upon which conventions concerning
the biological or normal are connected with conventions concerning the medical or pathological. They
observe that new platforms are often aligned with existing ones and integrated into an expanding set
of clinical-biological strategies.