ABOUT BOOK

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.