Christopher Condin

PhD Candidate
MA (U British Columbia)
BA (U Victoria)

Supervisor: William H. McKellin, PhD

Email: condin{-a-t-}interchange.ubc.ca

Research interests: My work is in medical anthropology and relates broadly to the experience of rare diseases in families. I am working with one particular rare neuromuscular illness called Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), a muscle-wasting disease which primarily affects boys and young men. Diseases like DMD have historically been considered "incurable" for a variety of reasons (not only scientific, but also political and economic). Today there are a number of drugs and biologics being investigated in clinical trials, including pharmacogenomic agents, gene therapy, "stem cell" therapy, and RNA-interference strategies. The current moment is one of great hope and expectation that there will soon be new set of viable genomic treatments for this, and many other, rare diseases.

My work uses ethnographic and historical research methods to investigate the meaning and significance of these treatments for the various groups of people that together make up the cultural field of investigative medicine. I am currently engaged in a multi-sited dissertation study of families' experiences enrolling their children in clinical trials. I am interested in how this experience both emerges from, and changes, day-to-day life with a serious pediatric illness, and in what we can learn from closer examination of families' experiences with illness more generally.

More theoretically, I am interested in the ways that the translational process in therapeutic development creates new practices, social relationships, ways of conceptualizing disease and, given the genomic nature of many experimental therapeutic agents, frames for understanding what treatment is, and how it "works". This rapidly shifting cultural context in turn influences how families experience and narrate illness, how they choose to hope for and pursue experimental treatments, and how they choose to care for a child or young adult with a chronic, disabling illness.

Publications:

Condin, C. (Forthcoming). Epigenetics, Past & Present: An analysis of the discourse of epigenetics and its relationship to genetics in the mid-twentieth century.

Condin, C. (2005). The Changing Meaning of Gene Therapy: The significance of curative genetic research in the narratives of families with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Master's thesis, University of British Columbia.