Medicine, including fields in healthcare and life sciences, has seen a flurry of quantum-related activities and experiments in the last few years (although biology and quantum theory have arguably been entangled ever since Schrödinger's cat). The initial focus was on biochemical and computational biology problems; recently, however, clinical and medical quantum solutions have drawn increasing interest. The rapid emergence of quantum computing in health and medicine necessitates a mapping of the landscape. In this review, clinical and medical proof-of-concept quantum computing applications are outlined and put into perspective. These consist of over 40 experimental and theoretical studies. The use case areas span genomics, clinical research and discovery, diagnostics, and treatments and interventions. Quantum machine learning (QML) in particular has rapidly evolved and shown to be competitive with classical benchmarks in recent medical research. Near-term QML algorithms have been trained with diverse clinical and real-world data sets. This includes studies in generating new molecular entities as drug candidates, diagnosing based on medical image classification, predicting patient persistence, forecasting treatment effectiveness, and tailoring radiotherapy. The use cases and algorithms are summarized and an outlook on medicine in the quantum era, including technical and ethical challenges, is provided.

In 2008, the Chinese government created the Thousand Talents Program (TTP) to recruit overseas expertise to build up China’s science and technology knowledge and innovation base. Ten years later, in 2018, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced a new “China Initiative” that aimed to counter the transfer by U.S.-based scientists involved in the TTP of knowledge and intellectual property that could support China’s military and economic might and pose threats to U.S. national security. This initiative launched a number of investigations into major U.S. federal funding agencies and universities and charged several scientists, many of them life scientists, with failing to accurately report their work and affiliations with Chinese entities and illegally transferring scientific information to China. Although the FBI cases demonstrate a clear problem with disclosure of foreign contracts and research integrity among some TTP recipients, they have failed to demonstrate any harm to U.S. national security interests. At the heart of this controversy are core questions that remain unresolved and need more attention: What is required to transfer and develop knowledge to further a country’s science and technology ambitions? And can the knowledge acquired by a visiting scientist be easily used to further a country’s ambitions? Drawing on literature from the field of science and technology studies, this article discusses the key issues that should be considered in evaluating this question in the Chinese context and the potential scientific, intelligence, and policy implications of knowledge transfer as it relates to the TTP.

Nineteenth-century Prussia was deeply entrenched in philhellenism, which affected the ideological framework of its public institutions. At Berlin’s Friedrich Wilhelm University, philhellenism provided the rationale for a persistent elevation of the humanities over the burgeoning experimental life sciences. Despite this outspoken hierarchy, professor of physiology Emil du Bois-Reymond eventually managed to increase the prestige of his discipline considerably. We argue that du Bois-Reymond’s use of philhellenic repertoires in his expositions on physiology for the educated German public contributed to the rise of physiology as a renowned scientific discipline. Du Bois-Reymond’s rhetorical strategies helped to disassociate experimental physiology from clinical medicine, legitimize experimental practices, and associate the emerging discipline with the more esteemed humanities and theoretical sciences. His appropriation of philhellenic rhetoric thus spurred the late nineteenth-century change in disciplinary hierarchies and helped to pave the way for the current hegemonic position of the life sciences.

In the article we report on the findings of an EU-funded research project, Paganini (Participatory Governance and Institutional Innovation), that investigated the question of whether ‘politics of life’ themes have led to the emergence of new forms of governance in Europe. The focus of our research was on human embryonic stem cell research, genetic testing, GM crops, and BSE in the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, and on the EU level—hotly contested topics at the intersection of society, politics, nature and the human body. We argue that, in the domain of life-political issues, the notions of participation and governance have become intermingled to an unusual extent. Our case studies demonstrate that the concept of participation needs to be rethought. While ‘spontaneous’ public participation certainly still is a political fact, increasingly participation has turned into a ‘technology’ that is based on the construction of publics. Different participatory technologies are linked to a changing landscape of political subjects considered relevant to the debate. As the case studies have shown, the design of any formal participatory arrangement involves a considerable amount of ‘engineering’, including arrangements seeking to invite a ‘representative’, disinterested, ‘pure’ public. There is no such thing as ‘the public’ waiting for pure representation. Formal participatory arrangements are inevitably based on a process of active construction, involving goal setting, selection, decision making and prioritization, including the decision to prioritize the pure public at the expense of engaged publics. What seems to be occurring today is that ‘old’ definitions of social order no longer hold and various groups try to impose new (partial) definitions of a new order on others. A new, postmodernist logic seems to be spinning new relations among citizens/consumers and scientists and administrators. Thus, there is no single New Way of governing Europe.

In China ideology has played an important role in the research and teaching of the biological sciences since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). After the 1978 reforms, it was recognized that the discontinuation of political interference with the sciences was essential for their survival and development. However, not much later, when the fields of genetics and molecular biology became redefined as life sciences, internationally, bioethical regulation became an essential element of research regulation. The evolution of medical textbooks in the PRC reflects this. Using the cases of human cloning and human embryonic stem cell research, this article shows how science regulation incorporates cultural and political ideologies. These, on the one hand, form a continuation of modes of state propaganda and, on the other hand, embody newly formulated notions of Chinese society. This article provides a historical background of the role of ideology during the first decades of the PRC, after which it discusses the evolution of bioethical discussion of human cloning and human embryonic stem cell research in 17 medical textbooks over nine years (1996–2005). It concludes with a discussion on the changing role of ideology in bioethical policy-making for the life sciences.