Michelle LaBonte

Michelle LaBonte is a historian of biomedicine and a biologist with interests in the history of diagnostics and therapeutics.

Her first book, Challenging Diagnosis: Cystic Fibrosis, Diagnostic Technologies, and the Persistence of Uncertainty in Medicine, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press. Challenging Diagnosis examines the sociocultural and scientific factors that have contributed to diagnostic uncertainty in medicine, foregrounding the impact of such uncertainty on patients and families. Cystic fibrosis is an ideal case to study the diagnostic process because it is often described in general medical and biology texts as a model genetic disease that is straightforward to identify, yet as CF physicians and social scientists have documented, the diagnosis of CF has long been fraught with challenges. As the CF case illustrates, diagnostic uncertainty has persisted despite – and because of – new technologies. Each technology, introduced with the hope that it would reduce uncertainty, instead introduced novel forms of uncertainty, such that the diagnosis of CF is no more straightforward today than it was in the mid-twentieth century. Since many of these diagnostic technologies (or their analogs) have been used throughout medicine, these findings are broadly applicable beyond CF, and demonstrate the significant harms associated with such a heavy reliance on test results that prioritize disease specificity over patient narratives.

Prior to joining the faculty at Purdue, LaBonte was a Lecturer in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University, where she received a PhD in the History of Science in 2022 and was recognized with several awards for her teaching. Some of her recent work has appeared in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, and the Journal of the History of Biology.

Before embarking on a career as a historian, LaBonte was initially trained as a biologist, receiving a BA in Molecular Biology from Princeton University and a PhD in Virology in the Division of Medical Sciences from Harvard University. At Harvard, she was recognized with several awards for her research on the immune system. Following post-doctoral work on HIV at Harvard, she spent over a decade teaching undergraduate students in the classroom and in the laboratory, including six years on the faculty in the Department of Biological Sciences at Wellesley College. During her years as a practicing biologist, LaBonte was recognized with a faculty mentor award for undergraduate research and she published widely in molecular genetics, immunology, biomedical ethics, and biology education.

Michelle LaBonte is currently accepting graduate students with research interests in the history of modern biomedicine.