Biomarkers, the molecular gaze and the transformation of cancer survivorship
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the past two decades, molecular technologies have transformed the landscape of cancer diagnosis, treatment and disease surveillance. However, although the effects of these technologies in the areas of primary and secondary cancer prevention have been the focus of growing study, their role in tertiary prevention remains largely unexamined. Treating this topic as a problematic to be conceptually explored rather than empirically demonstrated, this article focuses on the molecularisation of tertiary prevention, especially the growing use of molecular biomarkers to monitor disease recurrence. Taking a semiotic approach, I speculate on the potential meanings of molecular biomarkers for people living with and beyond cancer and suggest the meanings of these technologies may differ in important ways for those on both sides of the risk divide: that is, those 'at risk' for cancer and those living with realised risk. Although molecular biomarkers may intensify a sense of 'measured vulnerability', by indexing cancer's presence they may also prove reassuring. Moreover, as an invisible but ostensibly 'transparent' sign, in some contexts they appear to enable cancer survivors to challenge biomedical decision making. In the light of recent oncological debates about the value of these biomarkers in tertiary prevention, I conclude by suggesting that signs can never be reduced to their 'objective' biomedical denotation in spite of professional attempts to expunge meaning and value from care.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it