Adriana Petryna: Life Exposed

Topographical mapping of short and long SSEP (somato-sensory evoked potentials) allows a characterization of the processes of perception and the workings of somato-sensory afferentation in all directions from the periphery to the brain stem. The machine measuring the electrical activity of the brain was used monopolarly, with referent electrodes placed on the lobes of the ear. Scalp electrodes were used according to the international scheme “10–20.” See Maurer and Dierks 1991:104. Also see Zenkov and Roikin 1991:640. See Dumit 1995 for an ethnographic analysis of the science of neuroimaging and reclassifications of psychiatric disorders.

See Flor-Henry 1979:189-193. This case analysis is based, in part, on Petryna and Biehl 1999.

The observation of this case took place in June 1996, Radiation Research Center, Kyiv.

Oleg had two children from a previous marriage.

This measure was applied over a seventy-year average life span (see chapter 2).

For details on this area of uranium ore extraction and public health effects, see Garb 1994.

Children are defined as persons below the age of fourteen. Statistics for the years 1986, 1987, 1996, and 1997 are not available.

Oblast is a territorial administrative unit analogous to a county in the United States.

The category of adults includes teenagers who are fourteen or older.

According to the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Radiation (1969), defects in the internal organs, spine, cranium, and brain stem appear on the fortieth day of the life of the forming fetus, and serious head defects begin to appear on the fiftieth day (Guskova and Baysogolov 1971:245-246).

This analysis draws in part on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of the effectiveness of symbols in healing to illuminate how individual histories and family dramas fuse with a clinical research program to induce illness. In the essay, a Cuna woman loses one of her spirit doubles ( purba ), a spirit whose role is to provide necessary vital strength for childbirth. Assisted by tutelary spirits, the shaman undertakes a journey to the supernatural world, constructing a “mythical anatomy” that “lights the healer’s way” to the malevolent spirit (the abusive “Muu”). He succeeds in snatching the double, the power responsible for the formation of the fetus, from the Muu. By restoring it to its owner, he achieves the cure (1963:188). In applying some of the lessons of this scene, I consider what scientific research restores to the mother, and what the mother’s narrative restores to science.

These recommendations are part of the ongoing “Brain Damage In Utero ” research program in the affected parts of Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia.

“Exposed adults, particularly women, had elevated somatization, anxiety, depressive, and post-traumatic stress symptoms during the first decade after the accident” (Bromet et al. 2000:564).

38. The tests were borrowed from the book Controlled Projection for Children, by J. C. Raven (London: H. K. Lewis, 1951); and Children’s Drawings as Measures of Intellectual Maturity, by D. B. Harris (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1963).