New opportunities for systematic collaboration between neuroscience and social science have opened up in recent years, and some of the potentials and the problems that accompany them are explored with reference to Damasio’s work. Systematic collaboration and integration might yield benefits for metatheoretical, theoretical and substantive inquiry, but will be impeded by language, conceptual and methodological problems. Strategies to facilitate collaboration are discussed, and it is concluded that methodological problems will be most difficult to resolve.

This article concerns the challenges faced by pharmaceutical researchers seeking to develop novel antidepressants. Based on ethnographic and documentary research into the drug development process, it shows how researchers try to manage the problem of the placebo response in antidepressant trials. The high rate of placebo response in these trials makes it difficult to demonstrate efficacy and often leads to trial failure. According to researchers, a major reason for high placebo response rates is the inability of standardized rating scales to define a coherent group of ‘drug responders’. They have developed alternative means of classifying patients in order to circumvent this problem and thereby improve the chances of trial success. In their search for ‘the right patients for the drug’, pharmaceutical researchers also provide an incisive critique of the epistemological assumptions underlying the clinical trial process.

Dor Yeshorim, a genetic testing programme focusing on the ‘genetic compatibility’ of prospective couples in Orthodox Jewish communities in Europe, the US and Israel, is at the centre of our paper. We discuss the specific understandings of risks that enable the effective implementation of the Dor Yeshorim model in Orthodox populations. Furthermore, we compare Dor Yeshorim to the premarital genetic testing programme for thalassaemia in Cyprus and analyse the particular social practices which generate different notions of genetic identity in these two projects. In the Cypriot programme, where individual carrier status is disclosed, unfavourable genetic carrier status is conceptualized on the individual level and often solved by resorting to prenatal genetic diagnosis upon pregnancy. In the case of Dor Yeshorim, where no information on carrier status but only on the ‘genetic compatibility’ of both partners is revealed, a notion of ‘genetic couplehood’ arises which conceptualizes ‘genetic risk’ not individually but as a matter of genetic jointness. If a prospective couple is found out to be ‘genetically incompatible’, marriage plans usually are cancelled. Furthermore, by not disclosing individual carrier information, Dor Yeshorim successfully avoids a pressing issue which ‘secular’ genetic testing programmes struggle with: the peril of ‘knowing too much’.

This article examines the historical roots of synthetic biology, highlighting the multiple meanings and understandings of the term. Synthetic biology as it is used today refers to an especially wide range of endeavors, embodying an equally wide range of aims, and having correspondingly various relations to the activities generally included in the discipline of biology. To address the question of what synthetic biology has to do with biology, this article illustrates some of the ways in which the entanglement of synthetic biology as the epitome of technoscience and synthetic biology as an alternative, artificial biology plays out in three different examples of synthetic biology—one current and two historical.

Exchange of material originating in human bodies is essential to many health technologies but potentially conflicts with a prominent moral ideal according to which human bodies and their parts are beyond trade. In this article, I suggest that the inclination to keep bodies apart from ‘commercial exchange’ has significant implications for the way their parts come to be exchanged. The analysis revolves around two versions of the hip: one prosthetic version made of metal and one version made of bone, the femoral head, which is excised in conjunction with hip replacements and later used for transplantation. How are exchange systems for something moving in and out of human beings organized? Who provides what and who receives what? When and where does money change hands? How are the specific amounts determined? By answering these questions, I provide a description of the exchange form that avoids assuming it to be simply a ‘market’ or a ‘gift economy’. I focus on the mechanisms that allow money to be generated despite the moral ideal viewing body parts as beyond trade—or, rather, the how the ideal facilitates mechanisms through which money can be generated without being viewed as profit. In particular, I suggest that ‘compensation’ is an important example of a mechanism in need of further scrutiny.

This article considers the complex construction of randomized controlled trials that lies behind the rhetoric of the gold standard. Drawing on insights from Science and Technology Studies and empirical material, I argue that trials in the field of cardiovascular disease prevention are constituted as ‘research’ rather than ‘science’. In these examples, control emerges out of a dual concern with practices of purification and involvement of aspects of the world outside the experiment, as the designers of trials aspire to relevance as well as rigour. Such strategies of ‘contextualization’ mean that trials are more like alchemy than assay, proceeding by complex moves to transform ‘base’ matters rather than distilling elements of clinical practice.

The prospect of being able to take safe and effective drugs to improve mental functioning is becoming a reality. With the potential for widespread use of cognitive enhancers by large sectors of the population, this article discusses the rationale behind the development of these drugs and how society might benefit from them. Important ethical questions and scenarios are also raised. Scientists are urged to explore the implications of their work and engage in active debate with a wide range of interested stakeholders about the ethical and moral consequences of these new technologies to ensure maximal benefit with minimal harm.

It is a striking feature of current biomedicine that it increasingly relies on access to various types of human biological material. Social scientists often criticize the exchange systems facilitating this access for causing a process of ‘commodification’. Though it is not always clear what commodification is thought to imply, a morally degrading transformation from something intrinsically human to an object of ownership seems to be at stake in most accounts. Enrolment in capitalist exchange is typically portrayed as (actively) changing the status of the (passive) body part from being part of a dignified human whole to be a mere fungible commodity. In this article I argue that the notion of commodification is inadequate for an analysis of the dynamics at play in the establishment of exchange systems for human biological material. In particular I focus on the development of the patent regime. The point is that rather than focusing merely on what capitalist forms of exchange do to biotechnology and the body, we might begin to appreciate what biotechnology and the socio-cultural significance of the body do to capitalism and its property structures—or, more precisely, how people’s engagement with, and concern about, biotechnology contributes to the shaping of multiple capitalisms.

The complex ways in which technical challenges of trial design provoke, and are provoked by, ethical, commercial and political factors are considered. It is suggested that the quality of the drug trial evidence base greatly depends on the how ethical, commercial and political priorities are set, and not merely on standardized techniques of data processing. Whether such standardized techniques are raising or lowering the quality of safety information about new drugs, and the protection of patients on clinical trials is explored. It is revealed that these international standards, intended to define valid evidence-based medicine for drug trials, are not themselves robustly evidence-based. It is argued that the internationalized regulatory standards developed to frame the evidence base for drug safety and efficacy are frequently inconsistent with furthering patients’ well-being and public health. Rather, those standards reflect a regulatory culture of neoliberal corporate bias, and have been powerfully shaped by the commercial and political interests of the pharmaceutical industry and regulatory institutions. It is questionable that regulatory agencies are thoroughly and robustly scrutinizing the claims that pharmaceutical firms make about their products. New political and regulatory arrangements that could facilitate more ethical drug trials in the interests of patients and public health are proposed.

This article analyses the role of the pharmaceutical and medical device industries (‘pharma’) in the construction of scientific and medical knowledge. Pharma's activities are part of the broader dispositif of institutions, enterprises, regulations and constituencies within which medical-scientific knowledge is generated, but pharma's contributions exhibit a specific character reflecting commercial pressures. As drug development proceeds, research and marketing activities coalesce around ‘product canons’ that integrate scientific truth-claims and commercial positioning, generating knowledge with implicit commercial functionality. From this platform, pharma stamps consensus-building ‘narratives’ into medical-scientific discourse, in which ‘problems’ arise and are ‘solved’ by drugs. Concurrently, pharma modulates the structure of discourse and the social networks through which discourse proceeds. Implicit within these activities is a meta-science whose goal is to understand and technologize the operation of science to an external end. This mode of knowledge production can be viewed as a normative transformation of Kuhnian normal science, characterized by the attachment (and at times subordination) of paradigmatic tenets to extrinsic goals; exaggerated control of belief, research and consensus formation; and a capacity for infringement of traditional norms of scientific truthfulness. An International Standard of Integrity in Science would strengthen pharma's contributions to medical and scientific knowledge.

Currently influential accounts of research use of human tissue depict biomedical science as operating in opposition to the norms and values of ‘the public’. Using historical analysis and empirical data from a qualitative study of 79 family members of a child with cancer, this article challenges such accounts of ‘the public’. Families of a child with cancer generally reported that they considered themselves to be members of a community united by a sense of common purpose, in which values and interests are shared and members of the community are to be trusted. The value of tissue for patients and families lay not so much in the way it embodied some essence of the self, as in the way it embedded them within the childhood cancer community. Historical analysis demonstrates that science and its broader ‘public’ are interdependent, mutually constitutive components of a culture, interacting and exchanging rhetoric and imagery relating to research and research materials, as well as the material itself. Rather than separate social worlds of ‘bioscience’ and ‘the public’, our evidence suggests that the childhood cancer community, in respect of the area of tissue banking for research, is much better conceived of as a hybrid. Understanding ‘the public’ and ‘science’ as a multiplicities helps clarify the existence of often competing views of tissue use.

The placebo effect is variously vilified as a basis for unethical medical practice, dismissed as the ephemeral product of gullible imaginations, sanctioned as key to the clinical trials process, and romanticized as evidence of the mind’s quasi-miraculous power to heal the body. These many meanings of the placebo effect exist for a reason: they are products of multiple histories whose legacies continue to be upheld by various stakeholders in debates in which placebos and their effects figure today.

It is widely recognized that traditional informed consent requirements are highly problematic in the context of population-based genetic research. This article is based on a qualitative study that describes and analyses the consenting procedures and perceptions of donors to the North Cumbria Community Genetics Project (NCCGP), a DNA bank in northwest England. The NCCGP collected placenta and cord tissue, as well as maternal blood samples and health and lifestyle information, in order to conduct genetic epidemiological studies. The findings show that the nature of the sample (i.e. afterbirth) significantly impacted donors’ decision to donate. The antenatal context also influenced the way the request was framed to potential donors, who had a limited understanding of the aims of the biobank. However, the article concludes that a lack of understanding on the part of donors is not necessarily an ethical problem and that efforts to re-think informed consent guidelines may benefit from paying greater attention to the factors that motivate people to donate in the first place.

Examining the rise and fall of a public–private marine biotechnological enterprise in Hawaii, this article analyses how promises to make products and profits from marine microbes in archipelagic waters drew upon peculiarly American sentiments about the sea as a politically uncontested treasure-chest of biodiversity. I argue that attention to the material process by which lab and legal instruments are calibrated to one another to generate biotech exchange-value must be joined by consideration of how scientists and their interlocutors imagine the meaning of biology—as discipline and as corporeal substance and process. Without such symbolic analysis, theorizations of biocapital remain incomplete. To discuss the genre of capitalism evidenced in marine biotechnological endeavors in Hawaii, I develop the concept of blue-green capitalism, where blue stands for a vision of the freedom of the open ocean and for speculative sky-high promise, and green for belief in ecological sustainability as well as biological fecundity. I show that this vision, dominant in industry–university settings, ran into direct conflict with Native Hawaiian legal epistemologies of the sea.

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.

The methods and theoretical repertoire of the biomedical sciences are undergoing rapid change fuelled, first and foremost, by advances in genomics and molecular biology. At the same time, social and environmental phenomena are being incorporated in new ways into medical frames of reference affecting professional practice as well as regimes of prevention and health promotion. In turn, these developments impact upon the social sciences and humanities concerned with new forms of dynamic corporealities in social and medical practice. This article outlines in a programmatic fashion three sets of issues that are likely to acquire significant relevance in this context: (1) looping effects will emerge along different pathways between medical diagnosis, selfhood, social practice and the body itself. The investigation of these dynamic interactions has so far received little attention in the social sciences and will require the development of a different methodological approach to do justice to different kinds of data and long-term effects. (2) Advances in the understanding of epigenetic regulation have begun to fundamentally change notions of inheritance and development and to differentiate the central dogma of genetics (DNA makes RNA makes Protein), with significant implications for notions of interand intra-generational responsibility and biographical time regimes. (3) The incorporation of ‘things social’ into medical domains is being taken to a new level of significance, fuelled by a number of fundamental shifts in medical reasoning and practice. The social sciences’ current focus on (epi)genetics can only be a starting point for a broader interdisciplinary agenda to better understand the pathways through which ‘the social and cultural’ enters the body. The final section of this article discusses somatography as a practice-oriented approach attempting to address some of these issues in a symmetrical investigation across epistemic cultures.

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.

Taking the example of Craig Venter’s marine bio-prospecting expedition, this article explores the effects that bioinformatics and sequencing technologies have had upon the process of bio-prospecting. What kind of an aggregate is a collection that spans evolutionary ecologies, database logics and programmable synthetic organisms? And by means of what displacements, translations and topologies are genetic collections ‘made up’ in the age of bioinformatics and synthetic biology?

Following the stringent critiques of organizers of the Human Genome Diversity Project for excluding people from the initiative’s early planning, subsequent administrators of high-profile efforts to study human genetic variation, such as the International HapMap Project, have made great efforts to stress the importance of including the people who are to be the objects of study in research design and regulation. Such efforts to ‘democratize’ genomics would appear to represent a positive development. However, in practice they have satisfied few as they fail to recognize the most basic lesson of the Human Genome Diversity Project debates: genomics raises questions not just about the inclusion of people, but about their very constitution. Positing concrete, stable subjects in society, current efforts to ‘democratize’ genomics fail to recognize that entangled in the fundamental questions about nature posed by this emergent form of technoscience are fundamental questions about the order and constitution of societies. The creation of sustainable and desirable forms of governance require us to come to terms with challenges posed to liberal democratic practices and values, such as inclusion, in an age defined partially by this mutual dis/ordering of nature and society.