As part of my interest in the persistence of unproductive debates about the relative importance of nature and nurture, I focus here on the especially problematic relation between nature and the natural. For if the definition of nature is problematic, its semantic relation to ‘natural’ is even more so. I explore some of the problems that arise from slippage between substantive and normative conceptions of ‘natural’ (inviting collateral slippage between is and ought), from the bifurcatory structure of its negation and from changing assumptions about nature’s domain.

This article challenges the idea that there could be a convincing secular version of the principle that human life is sacred, and explores the significance this has for the law. A number of secular justifications for the claim that there is something intrinsically, as opposed to instrumentally, valuable about human life have been mooted, most eloquently by Ronald Dworkin. While secular explanations for the sanctity of human life are undeniably attractive, this article will maintain that they do not have logic on their side. Having argued that the ‘sanctity principle’ makes sense only as an article of religious faith, the implications this has for the law are explored. In relation to end-of-life decision-making, the sanctity principle has been invoked to justify a sharp line between deliberately ending life and failing to prolong it. This article will conclude by arguing that a rejection of the sanctity principle might, in certain circumstances, cause us to focus instead on the extent to which death harms someone.

M.H. Pappworth's 1967 book, Human guinea pigs, was a major catalyst for change in the ethics and regulation of human research in the 1970s. Many of Pappworth's ethical concerns about the threats posed to human subjects are still valid today, yet the source of those threats has shifted from universities to industry sponsors.

This article draws on ethnographic research conducted at a number of brain imaging sites to examine investigations into emotion, and specifically the experience of pleasure. Using a small set of healthy volunteers, the experiments are designed to observe reactions in the brain when people are subjected to carefully chosen stimuli. But as these studies shift from structural to functional aspects, the imperative to establish a material basis for complex abstract experiences is compelling the scientists to revise previous descriptions of the brain. In order to generate a single model that can satisfactorily associate the experimental stimuli with observed responses, intricate interactions relating to both time and space have to be disentangled and reorganized into a singular linear narrative. As a result, only those elements that can be localized and delimited emerge as components of the pathways and maps used to represent the experience. Wider issues, such as the social context of the experiment, the meaning of the experience for the volunteer, or acknowledgement that different things might be happening at the same time, cannot be reconciled with this process. Consequently, the final neuroscientific accounts inevitably ignore or circumvent aspects that cannot be described in a very particular way.

This paper analyses a remarkable transformation of global capitalism in recent years: that corporations claim to be ‘good citizens’ and are driven by higher aspirations than profits alone. It focuses on the lawsuit brought by the drug company Novartis against the Indian government over the patent for the anti-cancer drug Glivec. Novartis’ attack on Indian patent law caused an international outcry. Opponents of Novartis argued that the company was trying to destroy essential provisions in the Indian law that keep drugs affordable even after the country signed up to the World Trade Organization's agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). With reference to ‘the constitutional obligation of providing good health care to its citizens’, the High Court in Chennai, India, dismissed Novartis’ challenge in August 2007. While health activists celebrated the court's decision as a victory for anti-corporate citizens, this article argues that Novartis won a more important battle elsewhere: to protect its profits in European and North American markets. The article shows how claims to ‘citizenship’ were mobilized by both anti-Novartis and pro-Novartis groups, and how Novartis’ global corporate citizenship programme succeeded even when it seemed to fail.

Drawing on previous research on geneticization and the clinical uptake of pharmacogenetics, this article argues for the use of the concept of clinical usefulness, in preference to the idea of clinical resistance to such testing. A general framework for clinical usefulness is sketched out, looking at how a number of features (clinicians’ knowledge, the differing interests of clinicians and researchers, how context influences the value of tests’ accuracy, the economic aspects of such tests and general cultural aspects of the clinic) influence how ‘useful’ a genetic or pharmacogenetic test will be seen to be by clinicians.

This article explores the FBI's early efforts to develop and implement a standardized DNA profiling regime in a legal and scientific landscape shaped by strong defense challenges to the technique. Although the FBI claimed numerous times that its standardization efforts were purely ‘technical’, the FBI knew it had to create a social infrastructure that would serve to ensure the validity and reliability of the forensic DNA evidence. At the center of the system would be the FBI, serving as the obligatory, if reluctant, passage point for both technical and social exchanges. The FBI decided largely by fiat that forensic scientists based in public crime laboratories, but with little molecular biology and genetics training, bore the primary responsibility for setting standards, as well as carrying out, forensic DNA analysis. At the same time, the FBI actively excluded representatives from the private biotechnology companies that introduced the technique into the legal system, as well as the members of the defense community that were responsible for highlighting potential problems with the technique in court.