Judging from attendance records worldwide, Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds: The Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies is perhaps the most successful exhibition ever. But while it has been the subject of intense legal, ethical and cultural controversy in Europe, the exhibition has been hailed by the American press, museum curators, theologians and medical professionals as a homage to the wonders of the human body, a wonderful educational vehicle and an admonition to healthful living. The article explores this affirmative American response to Body Worlds, considering changes in the exhibition venue and presentation, as well as discourses surrounding it, that have conferred a new respectability on Body Worlds and suppressed a critical engagement with its ethical, aesthetic, ideological and economic implications.

The question of informed consent has been central to public and scholarly debates on research biobanking, as well as to regulatory efforts. We discuss why this concept has gained such a central position and argue that it has less to do with its adequacy as a regulatory tool than with its capacity as a deflecting concept, shifting the focus away from more serious, but at the same time less governable issues. While its main value for medical science lies in its function as a signifier of ‘normal’ and responsible scientific conduct, in politics it functions as an ‘emergency exit’, a way to remove fundamental problems from the public and political field without having to solve the unsolvable. The individualizing gaze of informed consent overshadows questions of a predominantly collective nature, such as possible broader socio-cultural changes brought about by biobank-based research. However, the notion of genetic solidarity or altruism, which has been offered as an alternative framework to informed consent, does not open up the space for political and public debate on the objectives and consequences of research biobanks, but rather puts a further lid on such debate, through defining medical research as an unconditional good in its own right.

In this article I maintain that different constellations of political and socio-economic interest groups lead to diverging approaches to defining research targets in population genetics. First, I show how different political and socio-cultural views of possible target groups in the People’s Republic of China and in the Republic of China have crucial consequences for the ways in which scientists define their research subject, collect and interpret their genetic samples, and conduct their research. Thus the unit of research, or group delineation, in genetic population studies cannot be viewed separately from its political and social context. Second, examples from population genetics in the People’s Republic of China are used to show how genetic approaches to populations are necessarily mediated by social and political categories, which may or may not lead to conflicting interpretations of genetic data. Finally, in China and Taiwan research target groups are defined through different cultural and political perceptions intimately linked to these two nations’ positions as players on the international political and diplomatic stage. Moreover, international and national competition and research politics affect sampling strategies and the selection of research populations. The political and economic issues related to the definition of socio-genetic groups are shown to have implications for bioethical debates.

In the medical literature in the United States and France, sickle cell trait (HbAS) is generally described as a benign condition. Curiously, however, people in Dakar, Senegal, and women in particular, complain of symptoms attributed to this trait, which most doctors in this part of West Africa diagnose as a moderate form of sickle cell anemia—a professional tendency that is now beginning to change. This article draws on ethnographic materials to understand Senegalese sickle cell trait suffering as an instance of social suffering mediated not only through cultural and biological forms, but also through cultural and biological ‘options’ to be sick. It examines the interplay of social distresses caused by sickle cell trait, and disease, diagnoses. It concludes that suffering attributed to sickle cell trait consists of a complex nexus marked by economic privations, social practices that are specifically gendered as female, religious fatalism and various ecological and environmental stressors. Theoretically, this article joins the concept of social suffering to that of biosociality. The resultant assemblage is ‘biosocial suffering’ whereby women with sickle cell trait articulate and manifest social and physical pains through the biological entity of this recessive allele.

This article offers a socio-historical account of the development of the Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) diagnosis and methylphenidate treatment in America, attending particularly to the institutional and professional contexts that have supported this development. These historical developments frame a socio-cultural analysis that views contemporary schools and schooling practices as mediating factors in ADHD diagnoses and methylphenidate treatment. Consideration of the school as a mediating socio-cultural context illuminates important questions about the validity of the ADHD diagnosis, and about inter- and intra-national variations in the perception and tolerance of young children’s behavior, educational and behavioral goals for children, and styles of treating problem behaviors in children. It is argued that both local and cross-national research on schools and schooling are important means of increasing understanding of the complex socio-cultural factors inherent in the global growth of ADHD diagnoses and methylphenidate treatment.

This article considers how threats become constituted as problems requiring policy responses, and how one might account for such problematizations and responses. Focusing specifically on the threat from bioterrorism, it draws on a broadly constructivist approach to risk, and highlights how ideas around political rationalities, styles of thought, forms of risk and frameworks of knowledge can be useful in thinking about emerging biosecurity policies. It suggests that a comparative study of Britain and the United States might help to clarify how the threat of bioterrorism is being constructed by various groups, how support for particular ‘framings’ of the threat is being mobilized and taken up in policy networks, and how this is linked to different courses of action in response to the possibility of bioterrorism.

There has been much recent debate and controversy over the apparent expansion of the use of certain psychiatric classifications, and the treatment of those so diagnosed, in particular their treatment with psychiatric drugs. Some have suggested that this arises from ‘disease mongering’ by a pharmaceutical industry keen to sell its products. Others have implied that psychiatrists are the key agents, acting as ‘moral entrepreneurs’ claiming that society is ignoring an area of suffering that they are best placed to understand and treat. Others have suggested that the expansion is part of a social and cultural malaise, in which individuals increasingly define problems of living as disorders in need of treatment. This article reviews the evidence of the expanding scope of psychiatric diagnosis, focusing on depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and personality disorder. It examines a number of arguments that seek to account for this expansion and suggests that we need a more complex approach to understand the growth of these diagnoses, not only addressing marketing of drugs by pharmaceutical industry and the role of doctors, but also examining the pressures and incentives that lead to the ascription of such diagnoses and their treatment with drugs.