Barbados is a center of international genetic research premised on race. Drawing on
ethnographic fieldwork following Johns Hopkins studies carried out in Barbados, this
article explores this travel for research. This biomedical science relies on a
conflicting significance of Barbados: as a site of suffering, due to the disparities
of disease, and, conversely, a site of ease, playing on desires and pleasures of
escaping too much asceticism in biomedicine. For the American researchers, Barbados
becomes a locus of desire to ethically address the African diaspora without the
quandaries of accusations and recriminations experienced in carrying out such work
in urban America. The concept of cathartic science is used to describe an endeavor
that creates a controlled space to know and act on some perceived sufferer without
risk of being complicit in the suffering. These medical migrations of researchers to
Barbados are paralleled by Bajan families participating in the American studies as a
kind of proxy medical migration to the US, bitterly reflecting on the care available
to them at home. This article explores the motives of this mutual travel, as a
biomedicalized Barbados becomes a spectral figure for patients and researchers
fraught with race, injustice, and desire. The article extends the concept of
cathartic science from genomics of race to medical anthropology to foreground the
desires and anxieties of any science of suffering.
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