| Περίληψη: | The growth of personalised medicine and patient partnerships in biomedical
research are reshaping both the emotional and material intersections
between human patients and animal research. Through tracing the creative work of
patients, publics, scientists, clinicians, artists, film-makers, and campaigning groups
this chapter explores how ‘patient voices’ are being rearticulated and represented
around animal research. The figure of ‘the patient’ has been a powerful actor in
arguments around animal research, mostly ‘spoken for’ by formal organisations,
especially in publicity material making ethical justifications for the need and funding
of medical research. Here, patient voices make corporeal needs legible, gather
expectations and resources, and provide the horizon for embodying future hopes.
However, the accessibility of digital media, alongside local institutional experiments
in openness, is creating alternative spaces for voicing patient interfaces with
animal research. On research establishment websites, and elsewhere, patients’ perspectives
are emerging in short films, taking up positions as narrators, tour guides,
and commentators, inviting the public to follow them into these previously inaccessible
spaces. The embodied experience of patients, sometimes severely affected by
the current absences in biomedical research, are used to authorise their presence in
these places, and allow them to ask questions of animal researchers. The films are
powerful and emotional vehicles for voicing patient experiences and opening up
animal research. They also refigure the affective responsibilities around animal
research, resituating a public debate around ethics within the body of the patient.
The future expectations personified in the abstract figure of the patient, are rendered
turbulent in the ambiguous corporeal encounter between human and animals undergoing
similar experiences of suffering.
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