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

本论文研究项目旨在研究风险和安全的框架，以及对哪些实体构成风险的理解，如何随着时间的推移而变化，以及这些变化如何影响政治，技术，社会和医疗决策。它将重点关注法国和美国的艾滋病病毒对血液供应的污染。通过检查风险感知的动态过程和从元素网络中构建风险的概念对象，本研究将追踪科学和/或政治争论的一个情节，并努力解决为什么试图遏制危机往往会产生相反的效果。20世纪80年代早期的血液污染为追踪概念性危险对象的继承和相互作用提供了一个特别好的场所。拟议的项目涵盖1980年代中期，当时人们对艾滋病的病因还不十分了解，对这种疾病的认识正在迅速发展。此外，还没有很好地界定这种疾病的“危险”人群。血友病患者用他们以前患肝炎的经历来描述这种威胁，血库工作者在与充足血液供应的威胁作斗争，两国的医生都将这种病毒的抗体确定为保护和感染的指标。通过追踪风险对象来研究血液供应中的艾滋病，可以更好地了解更普遍的风险动态。这对于评估风险感知、识别和政策制定过程中的变化的作用具有重要的社会意义，并且可以为政策相关领域、公共卫生、风险管理和健康相关领域的学者和专业人员指出产生潜在风险知识的新方法，特别是在处理具有极大不确定性和严重潜在后果的情况时，例如20世纪80年代的艾滋病或今天的变异型克雅氏病。美国国家科学基金会的资金将主要用于华盛顿/巴尔的摩地区的档案工作，该地区拥有与该项目相关的最多的采访和研究地点。

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.