Psychiatric Genetics: From Hereditary Madness to Big Biology develops a sociological approach of exploring the origins of psychiatric genetics by tracing several distinct styles of scientific reasoning that coalesced at the beginning of the 20th century.
"In this detailed and wide-ranging ethnographic study, Arribas-Ayllon et al provide an insightful exploration of the reorganization of infrastructures and expertise in psychiatric genetics. Their analysis of the distribution of value and emotional, boundary and engagement work across scientific hierarchies is particularly rich. Demonstrating how the relative immobility of more marginalised actors functions as a necessary condition for scaled up biology, this important book invites the scientific and academic community to look again at how reward should be distributed in the era of Big Biology."- Anne Kerr, Professor of Sociology, University of Leeds"Arribas-Ayllon, Bartlett, and Lewis's book invites us to follow them through the revolving doors and glassy atriums of a new science centre to consider the changing ways in which psychiatric genetics is taking place. Their work is a rich introduction to the spaces this discipline now occupies within the epistemologies of medical psychiatry, the interdisciplinary university campus, and the genetic infrastructures of global science. It both situates psychiatric genetics as particular form of inquiry, assembled from genealogies of clinical, statistical, and laboratory reasoning, as well as demonstrating how this is articulated through a wider network of affective relations and imaginaries circulating within research publications, patient involvement activities, and public engagement events. The effect is to render the complex processes that constitute the contemporary geographies of big biology visible, with all of its promises and compromises. The book demonstrates the value of thinking about science through question of space, scale, and speed. It is also timely too, as the unresolved tensions at the heart of psychiatric genetics continue to generate new scientific inquiry and social controversy in the search for the biological causes of psychiatric disorders."
