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 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.

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.

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’.

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.