Dissertation Research: The Tainted Gift: A comparative study of the framings of risk and safety of the contamination of the blood supply with AIDS virus in France and the U.S

Cornell University, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

This dissertation research project proposes to examine how framings of risk and safety, and understandings about which entities pose risks, change over time, and how these changes influence political, technical, social, and medical decisions. It will focus on the contamination of the blood supply with the AIDS virus in France and the United States. Through examination of the dynamic process of risk perception and the construction of conceptual objects of risk from a network of elements, this study will trace an episode of contention of science and/or politics, and grapple with the question of why attempts to contain crisis can often have the opposite effect. The contamination of blood during the early 1980s provides a particularly good site for tracing the succession and interaction of conceptual objects of risk. The proposed project covers the mid-1980s when the etiology of AIDS was not well understood, and when knowledge about the disease was evolving rapidly. In addition, the populations "at risk" for the disease were not yet well defined. Hemophiliacs framed the threat in terms of their previous experience with hepatitis, blood bankers struggled against a threat to an adequate supply of blood, and doctors in both countries identified antibodies to the virus as indicators of protection and as indicators of infection. The study of AIDS in the blood supply by tracing risk objects can provide a better understanding of the dynamics of risk more generally. It is socially significant for assessing the role of risk perception, identification, and change in policy making processes, and can point to new ways of producing knowledge about potential risk for scholars and professionals in policy-related areas, public health, risk management, and health-related fields, particularly when dealing with situations of great uncertainty and grave potential consequences, such as AIDS in the 1980s or variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease today. NSF funds will pay primarily for archival work in the Washington/Baltimore area, which has the largest number of interview and research sites relevant to the project.