Testing for food allergy/intolerance is a rapidly expanding market. We present an exploration of the efforts of one of the market leading companies in this sector to promote and justify their product in the face of considerable opposition from conventional medicine, as well as a range of alliances with patient groups, so-called ‘lifestyle gurus’ and their customers. In extracting the latent value of an immunoglobin called IgG, testing companies engage with and extend entrepreneurial patienthood and new forms of pastoral expertise in their efforts to identify and manage a group of low-level chronic conditions that resonate with contemporary social unease about the hazards of modernity. Rather than foregrounding novelty and hope, we found that a great deal of emphasis was placed upon establishing conventionality with business practice and scientific method, and relief from the past. We also found that the local circuits and networks of engagement, in which the company operated to secure their reputation and extend their market, were vitally important. We end by reflecting upon the implications of our analysis for contemporary scholarship on biocapitalism.

In this article we aim to expand the traditional ethical issues related to the use and storage of genetic information in forensic DNA databases by exploring the Portuguese practices of informed consent in the context of DNA sample collection for forensic processing. This article focuses on three interrelated domains: the practice of volunteering to contribute to the Portuguese forensic DNA database; the portfolio of risks presented to DNA donors; and the ethical implications of requesting donors’ ethnic group among their personal data. We argue that the Portuguese forensic DNA database is an interesting case study to re-focus the ethical debate on the implications of collecting genetic information, elucidating how this activity reconfigures interpersonal relations and social hierarchy, the power of legal medicine and criminal justice, and the social construction of personal autonomy, privacy and individual rights. The practices of informed consent need to incorporate answers to risks and uncertainties posed by collecting DNA samples and DNA profiling in forensic genetic databases.

This article discusses how cultural concepts of marriage and reproduction play a primary role in how genetic disorders are regarded in Japan. The article examines the anxieties that accompany the taking of genetic tests in the context of Japanese cultural concepts of family, care and genetic disorders. The analysis draws on data from two studies conducted over two years (2006–2008), based on semi-structured interviews with individuals affected by a genetic disorder, and a study of prenatal decision-making as regards the taking of tests during pregnancy, which also involved interviews with medical professionals, including certified clinical geneticists, genetic counsellors and scholars. A number of studies, as well as governmental documents, have emphasized the importance of respecting culture in dealing with a genetic disorder and genetic information. Though we regard respect for culture as important, we show that respect for culture might hide superstitions and culturally embedded prejudices about genetic disorders. We show this by analysing the given motivations of couples for taking a genetic test and by tracing the ways in which ‘genetic information’ is understood in a socio-cultural context.

Over the past two decades, public interest in the basic biological processes underlying the phenomenon of ageing has grown considerably. New developments in biotechnology and health maintenance programmes appear to be forging new relationships between biology, medicine and the lives of older people. A number of social scientists describe the process as the ‘biomedicalization of aging’. In this article, we argue that contemporary biogerontology, an important sub-field of gerontology that could be construed as the primary actor in the process of ‘biomedicalization’, should be regarded instead as advancing a critique of biomedicine. We then provide a genealogy of the critique and close the argument by pointing to sources of uncertainty within biogerontology, which should be taken into account in any further studies of the relationship between biology, medicine and the lives of older people.

In this article I explore attributions of credibility, important to designations of ‘expertise’, within the area of DNA patenting. I define ‘credibility’ as a relationship of recognition people establish to other actors. Through repeated interviews, interspersed with the provision of information, I have identified two different ways in which respondents position themselves in relation other actors as a way of assessing their credibility: when assuming a ‘partisan position’, they explicitly draw on ideological convictions; when assuming a ‘hierarchical position’, the ranking of credibility depends on how informed and objective others are perceived to be. The positions embody different roles for the respondents as ‘citizens’ and as ‘lay persons’, respectively; that is, they indicate the possession of contrasting ideas about their own relevance in policy matters. This raises the question of how to interpret the fact that people disqualify themselves from policy making, seeing themselves as incompetent. Challenging current conflict-focused models in the public understanding of science (PUS) literature, I argue that the hierarchical position can be interpreted as a broader desire for consensus. In the patent area, I show that paying attention to the hierarchical position is crucial to understanding why an industry representative is regarded by some to be a credible ‘expert’. The study sheds light on the ‘public understanding of expertise’ more broadly, and within the bioeconomic field in particular.

This article locates the beginnings of a synthetic biology network and thereby probes the formation of a potential disciplinary community. We consider the ways that ideas of community are mobilized, both by scientists and policy-makers in building an agenda for new forms of knowledge work, and by social scientists as an analytical device to understand new formations for knowledge production. As participants in, and analysts of, a network in synthetic biology, we describe our current understanding of synthetic biology by telling four tales of community making. The first tale tells of the mobilization of synthetic biology within a European context. The second tale describes the approach to synthetic biology community formation in the UK. The third narrates the creation of an institutionally based, funded ‘network in synthetic biology’. The final tale de-localizes community-making efforts by focussing on ‘devices’ that make communities. In tying together these tales, our analysis suggests that the potential community can be understood in terms of ‘movements’—the (re)orientation and enrolment of people, stories, disciplines and policies; and of ‘stickiness’—the objects and glues that begin to bind together the various constitutive elements of community.

The creation and use of transpecies human-animal embryos for research has figured prominently in recent highly controversial changes to UK reproductive legislation. This article reflects on the debate in the UK parliamentary context, drawing on socio-anthropological writing on hybridity. It seeks to make sense of two related cultural contradictions evident in the debate. First, a paradoxical position has been taken over decades in which the law simultaneously bans and yet permits the production of transpecies embryos. Second, key stakeholders have based their arguments on the simultaneous differentiation and dedifferentiation of embryos. Attempts to distinguish between different classes of embryo (cybrids, chimeras, pure hybrids, etc.) have been in tension with pressures to homogenize all embryos as morally equal. The article explores both of these contradictory tensions in the debate and their significance for the regulation and oversight of reproductive research.

Contemporary neuroscience links together soma and society in complex ways, casting the brain as the locus of a matrix of reciprocal interactions between soma and society. Accordingly, critiques of such research which revolve around its perceived ‘reductionism’ and ‘determinism’ are rendered somewhat problematic. That is not to say, however, that a critical sociology of neuroscience is redundant. Drawing on interviews with different kinds of neuroscientists investigating psychopathologies associated with antisocial behaviour (specifically, antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy), this article draws attention to the degree to which, by assigning roles to both ‘biology’ and ‘environment’ in the development of antisociality, neuroscience complicates the ontology of these categories, while at the same creating possibilities for the emergence of new kinds of deviancy, and legitimating social intervention in ‘risky’ children. In aligning somatic and societal narratives for the development of psychopathology, contemporary neuroscience may resist older sociological criticisms of biological reductionism, yet, in so doing, generate new claims with novel ethical and political valence.

Cloned animals are often understood as ‘models’ whose embodiments demonstrate the viability of somatic cell nuclear transfer and its applicability to a species body. In conceptualizing models through the trope of technoscience, Evelyn Fox Keller has argued that scientific models are not simply cognitive representations of something else, but are also embodiments of action and practice that constitute the kinds of scientific questions that can be asked and how those questions can be answered. Drawing on Keller’s language, I would say that, while we understand cloned animals as ‘models of’ somatic cell nuclear transfer, little empirical scholarship has explored what these animals are ‘models for’. This article asks what practices cloned animals embody, focusing on endeavours to clone endangered wildlife in the United States. Based on a multi-sited, ethnographic study, I show that these animals are models for conducting science in zoological parks, which entails questions regarding the kinds of knowledge practices that should be used to reproduce zoos and, in turn, meaningfully reconstitute wildlife. Based on this analysis, I contend that cloned animals not only model technique and scientific practices, but also new assemblages in the reproduction of zoos and, in turn, nature.

This article addresses how people who handle transgenic animals in practice—laboratory workers and members of animal ethics committees—talk about and handle dilemmas with transgenic animals. It is shown how dilemmas associated with transgenic animals become back-grounded through rhetorical comparisons with ‘something else’. Through these comparisons, transgenic animals are framed as normal, ordinary and thereby unproblematic on the one hand, and as valuable treasures in which are embedded hopes and expectations of future medical treatments on the other. This tension builds up to a discourse on transgenic mice as ordinary treasures. Towards the end of the article we discuss how this discourse tends to exclude possibilities of discussing specific dilemmas of genetically modified animals. Instead the discourse is contributing to certain transgenic silences. This article is based on the project ‘Dilemmas with transgenic animals’, in which notions of culture and nature, risk and safety, innovation and organism, science and technology, are investigated in the scientific production, use and ethical evaluation of transgenic animals. The project builds on case studies in two different contexts: laboratories and animal ethics committees. The methods used are interviews and ethnographic fieldwork.

We outline the framework of the new project of Critical Neuroscience: a reflexive scientific practice that responds to the social, cultural and political challenges posed by the advances in the behavioural and brain sciences. Indeed, the new advances in neuroscience have given rise to growing projects of the sociology of neuroscience as well as neuroethics. In parallel, however, there is also a growing gulf between social studies of neuroscience and empirical neuroscience itself. This is where Critical Neuroscience finds its place. Here, we begin with a sketch of several forms of critique that can contribute to developing a model of critical scientific practice. We then describe a set of core activities that jointly make up the practice of Critical Neuroscience as it can be applied and practised both within and outside of neuroscience. We go on to propose three possible areas of application: (1) the problems related to new possibilities of neuropharmacological interventions; (2) the importance of culture, and the problems of reductionism, in psychiatry; (3) the use of imaging data from neuroscience in the law as alleged evidence about ‘human nature’.

This article provides an empirical account of the application of genetic counselling in China based on interviews, clinical observation and literature research during a field study from September 2008 to February 2009, carried out mainly in China and partly in Hong Kong and the United Kingdom. Making comparisons with the situation in the UK and in Hong Kong, and from a social science perspective, the article outlines the situation of genetic counselling in China, discussing the qualifications for genetic counselling providers, the model of genetic clinical services, and their governance and supervision in Chinese social contexts. The article discusses Chinese practitioners’ understanding of and practice around ethical issues such as non-directiveness, informed choice and decision-making, and explores the extent to which this reflects the administrative, political and socio-economic environments in Chinese society. The article argues that the current state of genetic counselling in China arises mainly from its executive governance, non-professional genetic counselling provision, economic conditions and the lack of full healthcare coverage.

The increasing appreciation of structural plasticity, namely the capacity of the nervous system to alter not only its function but also its constitution in response to changing conditions, indicates a profound transformation in the scientific comprehension of the human brain. The research on adult neurogenesis, i.e. on the de novo formation of neurons in the mature brain, has been chosen as a circumscribed field to study the controversies that accompany the transition from the concept of a stable to that of a structurally plastic mammalian brain. Building on the concepts of thought style and thought collective developed by Ludwik Fleck, this article investigates the ways in which neurogenesis in the adult brain has changed from being negated to being accepted and highly valued, and consequently has become the focus of a novel research field. This analysis covers a period from the second half of the twentieth century up to the present. The development of research on adult neurogenesis has been shaped by two opposing views: the understanding of a particularly immutable and thus specifically human brain on the one hand, and a plastic brain which remains malleable during the entire adult life, on the other hand. This plastic human brain has created new space for the articulation of the ‘therapeutic promise’, since it lends itself much more readily to therapeutic intervention than a stable brain: the article argues this to be decisive in promoting the transformation of thought style within the neurosciences.

This article deals with recent changes in UK guidance on clinical waste, in particular a shift to disposable, single-use instruments and sharps. I use interviews conducted with nurses from a GP practice and two clinical waste managers at alternative treatment and incineration sites as a springboard for reflection on the relationship between the legislation on clinical waste management and its implementation. Scrutinizing the UK guidance, European legislation and World Health Organization principles, I draw out interviewees’ concerns that the changed practices lead to an expansion of the hazardous waste category, with an increased volume going to incineration. This raises questions regarding the regulations’ environmental and health effects, and regarding the precautionary approach embedded in the regulations. Tracing the diverse reverberations of the term ‘waste’ in different points along the journeys made by sharps in particular, and locating these questions in relation to existing literature on waste, I emphasize that public health rationales for the new practices are not made clear in the guidance. I suggest that this relative silence on the subject conceals both the uncertainties regarding the necessity for these means of managing the risks of infectious waste, and the tensions between policies of precautionary public health and environmental sustainability.

In this conversation, the world-renowned neurobiologist Yadin Dudai discusses the latest advances in memory research, specifically the discovery of memory ‘erasure’ associated with the inhibition of an enzyme called PKMzeta. The conversation tackles the reductionist method in scientific inquiry, the mind/brain dilemma, the problematics of animal models in memory research, and the therapeutic implications of this groundbreaking discovery.

The neurodiversity movement has so far been dominated by autistic people who believe their condition is not a disease to be treated and, if possible, cured, but rather a human specificity (like sex or race) that must be equally respected. Autistic self-advocates largely oppose groups of parents of autistic children and professionals searching for a cure for autism. This article discusses the positions of the pro-cure and anti-cure groups. It also addresses the emergence of autistic cultures and various issues concerning autistic identities. It shows how identity issues are frequently linked to a ‘neurological self-awareness’ and a rejection of psychological interpretations. It argues that the preference for cerebral explanations cannot be reduced to an aversion to psychoanalysis or psychological culture. Instead, such preference must be understood within the context of the diffusion of neuroscientific claims beyond the laboratory and their penetration in different domains of life in contemporary biomedicalized societies. Within this framework, neuroscientific theories, practices, technologies and therapies are influencing the ways we think about ourselves and relate to others, favoring forms of neurological or cerebral subjectivation. The article shows how neuroscientific claims are taken up in the formation of identities, as well as social and community networks.

This article studies how our understanding of population-level disease transmission has evolved over time. The main question is: what happens to ‘facts’ in the course of their life history? The concept of life history captures the process that shapes the facts of disease transmission, mobilizes them via mathematical and graphical representations, and allows them to evolve and change over time. Hence, this concept provides continuity from knowledge production to utilization. Life history is developed through phases in the ‘lives’ of ‘facts’: birth and youth, adulthood and reproductive years, and old age. The life-history approach consists of a set of ‘facts’ binding together knowledge of a disease, its routes of transmission, and the susceptibility of the exposed population; it thus provides an adequate framework to explore the complex nature of population-level disease transmission. The analytical focus of this article is concerned with how these ‘facts’ are disseminated via model-based or mathematical representations. Just as life histories are stories full of interactions, surprises and struggles, this article highlights the underlying contingencies in the dissemination and accumulation of factual knowledge.