• Journal of Science and Technology Studies
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.139-175
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• 2014

For the past 20 years, expert groups and citizens in Korea have debated on the usefulness of personalized medicine. These debates were mainly focussed on the possibility of the promise - people mainly discussed whether it was a probable future or if it was just a hype. Following Hedgecoe and Tutton(2002) who argue that it is only a 'rhetorial device', we will analyze about 9,000 news media coverages that deal with personalized medicine. With these data, we will show that the same terminology of personalized medicine have been used very differently according to the time and people who use it. Our research will show that this term has both diachronic heterogeneity and synchronic equivocality. This has happened because of the innate lack that exists in our symbolic system. Policy and governance regarding new technology is important because they provide quilting point to those slippery term/signifiant. Also we would like to carefully suggest that we might be able to call this phenomena as signifiant-politics.