Moving between two strands of our work on personalised cancer medicine, I ask about the persons that emerge through fieldwork in a large breast cancer service and a poetry residency in the hospital and a neighbouring NGO. I will share elements from fieldwork and from Written Portraits by Di Sherlock, the poetry collection that we have now launched, to explore methods of collaborative research and the objects they produce. Anthropologies of person have long demonstrated familiarity with dividuals as well as individuals, non-human and human persons and practices of personification or impersonation. We are also familiar with paths that script succession to valued positions in the lifecourse for a few. How can we best draw on this history to illuminate complex algorithmic pathways of person-making?