This article engages with the frequently made claim that the UK has a transparent, accountable and strict but permissive regulatory approach to research using pre-implantation human embryos created in vitro and that this approach provides reassurance to the public in a particularly emotive area, has the full confidence of the scientific and medical research communities, and gives the UK a competitive advantage in the international field of stem cell research. Aborted fetuses are another controversial source of stem cells although their use is less widely known. The paper uses Jasanoff’s conceptual tool of framing to analyse the history of the legislative and governance arrangements for the collection of aborted fetuses for use in stem cell research and therapies in Britain. We argue that the arrangements are confused, lack transparency, are out of line with current good practice on seeking consent, and that non-compliance with regulations is condoned. Furthermore, in our view, the separation of legal and governance arrangements for collection and use of pre-implantation human embryos and aborted fetuses will increasingly become problematic, and we conclude by proposing that there is increasingly a potential for conflict between them.

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.

Most feminist analyses of pharmaceutical medication engage with social or cultural concerns. This commentary will be more organic in focus. Is it possible that biological treatments of depression are more politically interesting than hitherto imagined in feminist scholarship? I will argue that innovative analyses of the body and psychological distress are possible when one is closely attuned to the detail of psychopharmaceutical treatment.

Evidence-based medicine emerged in connection with struggles for clinical authority in the second half of the twentieth century, as patient-centred medicine and community-oriented medicine presented challenges to laboratory-oriented medicine. The renowned medical researchers Alvan Feinstein and Archie Cochrane helped to develop the new models of patient-centred and community-oriented medicine respectively. They made important contributions to methodological reflections in medicine, and also contributed to social theories about clinical medicine and health care, challenging and criticizing in different ways dominant ontological medical understandings (such as essentialist conceptions of disease and illness). The medical ontologies of patient-centred and community-oriented medicine comprise different (partly incompatible) perspectives on what constitutes standards of evidence, something reflected, for example, in Feinstein and Cochrane’s contrary views on the importance of controlled trials. The analysis of their work in this article illuminates the connection between medical ontologies, standards of evidence and the political in general, reminding us of the need to explore the role of politics in discussions of evidence-based medicine.

The intertwined genealogies of racialization and medicalization are mutating once more, with the much heralded arrival of personal genomics. A proliferation of commercial organizations now offer web-based services that, on the basis of an analysis of a DNA sample from a cheek swab and at the cost of a few hundred dollars, promise to scan millions of variations in ‘my genome’ and to tell me where my ancestors came from, to compare my genome with others, and to enable me to calculate my risk for dozens of diseases and conditions from age-related macular degeneration, through Alzheimer's disease and prostate cancer, to restless legs. These new forms of genetic information arise in part from a crisis in genomic medicine, combined with a radical reduction in the costs of gene sequencing. They are linked to a new form of thinking about the genomic bases of disease that link ancestry and medicine in new ways. These cannot be understood simply by deploying the familiar tropes of sociological and anthropological critique—by repeating that ‘race has no biological meaning’. In this article I try to characterize the new ways of thinking about individuals and populations, about risk and responsibility, and about race and population differentiation that are taking shape, and explore their personal and social implications.

Herbal medicine has long been contrasted to modern medicine in terms of a holistic approach to healing, vitalistic theories of health and illness, and an emphasis on the body’s innate self-healing capacities. At the same time, since the early twentieth century, the cultivation, preparation and mass production of herbal medicines have become increasingly industrialized, scientificized and commercialized. What is more, phytochemical efforts to identify and isolate particular ‘active ingredients’ from whole-plant extracts have intensified, often in response to increasing regulatory scrutiny of the safety and quality of herbal medicinal products. In this article, I examine whether describing these developments in terms of a biomedical ‘colonization’ of herbal medicine, as has been common, allows us to sufficiently account for the mundane collaborative efforts of herbalists, botanists, phytochemists, pharmacologists, toxicologists and clinicians to standardize and develop certain herbal remedies. By focusing on recent efforts to industrialize and scientifically develop a ‘Western’ (St John’s Wort) and a Vietnamese (Heantos) herbal remedy, I suggest that herbal medicine has come to be not so much colonized as normalized, with herbalists, phytochemists and pharmacologists working to develop standardized production procedures, as well as to identify ‘plausible’ explanations for the efficacy of these remedies.

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 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.

Over the past two decades, public interest in the basic biological processes underlying the phenomenon of ageing has grown considerably. New developments in biotechnology and health maintenance programmes appear to be forging new relationships between biology, medicine and the lives of older people. A number of social scientists describe the process as the ‘biomedicalization of aging’. In this article, we argue that contemporary biogerontology, an important sub-field of gerontology that could be construed as the primary actor in the process of ‘biomedicalization’, should be regarded instead as advancing a critique of biomedicine. We then provide a genealogy of the critique and close the argument by pointing to sources of uncertainty within biogerontology, which should be taken into account in any further studies of the relationship between biology, medicine and the lives of older people.

Over the last decade, many European countries have sought to capitalize on the promising opportunities of human embryonic stem cell (HESC) research. Italy, in contrast, has renounced this line of research. HESC research is not altogether forbidden in Italian laboratories, but restricted and not supported by public investment. In this article, I seek to make sense of Italy’s stance. I argue that the politics of human embryonic stem cell research in Italy has arisen as a consequence of the reordering of Italy’s biopolitics through the ‘nationalization’ of Italian embryos. This has deprived Italian laboratories of their research material and given Italian stem cells their particular meaning.

Many factors, including the increasing commercialization of biomedicine, have caused medical practice to be increasingly divorced from the practice of caregiving. In this article, the authors argue that the two must be reunited in multiple ways if we are to have a just and compassionate healthcare and medical practice.

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.

The John Moore case in the United States and the Alder Hey scandal in Britain raised many urgent questions about the legal and ethical status of human tissue collections. This article intervenes in the current debates by posing an ontological question about tissue banking. The present discussions of the regulation of tissue archiving often rely upon a crisp, yet ill-defined, distinction between bodily ‘material’ and medical ‘information’, each bringing with it different legal and ethical considerations. Arguing that the distinction is actually difficult to draw and in urgent need of clarification, we propose that the term ‘information’ is too broad and vague to do the necessary work and suggest replacing it with a carefully theorized account of the precise ontological differences between material and textual resources. In the second half of the article we explore one particular case of the extraction of information from human tissues—the DNA sequence. We conclude by deploying the definitions reached in the first section in an effort to clarify some of the legal and ethical concerns about ‘genetic information’.

Despite the widespread consumption of stimulant drugs such as Ritalin (methylphenidate) for the treatment of children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), understanding of the differing national realities of the ADHD/methylphenidate phenomenon is especially impoverished. In this article, we give an introductory description of the scientific-historical, cultural and ideological factors that have shaped the diagnosis of ADHD and its treatment in Italy. Qualitative empirical analysis of the national debate on the use of methylphenidate and of parents’ experiences with the drug reveals that, in the Italian context, the evolution of the ADHD/Ritalin phenomenon has been largely shaped by dynamics within the country’s psychiatric practices and health system, as well as by attitudes towards mental illness. We suggest that in Italy, the current dynamics in the regulation of methylphenidate inscribe ADHD diagnosis and stimulant drug treatment as moral choices. On both the political and the familial level, these choices are grounded in sometimes opposing conceptions of vital civil rights and national ideals: the ‘right to medication’, the ‘right to mental health care’ and the ‘right to childhood’. Our study illustrates that close analysis of specific cultural contexts can be useful in understanding how attitudes towards mental disorders and the use of psychotropic drugs can be shaped by the social practices and medical habits of a country.

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.

The creation and use of transpecies human-animal embryos for research has figured prominently in recent highly controversial changes to UK reproductive legislation. This article reflects on the debate in the UK parliamentary context, drawing on socio-anthropological writing on hybridity. It seeks to make sense of two related cultural contradictions evident in the debate. First, a paradoxical position has been taken over decades in which the law simultaneously bans and yet permits the production of transpecies embryos. Second, key stakeholders have based their arguments on the simultaneous differentiation and dedifferentiation of embryos. Attempts to distinguish between different classes of embryo (cybrids, chimeras, pure hybrids, etc.) have been in tension with pressures to homogenize all embryos as morally equal. The article explores both of these contradictory tensions in the debate and their significance for the regulation and oversight of reproductive research.

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.

Developments in the brain sciences are a key focus for BioSocieties, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. We are thus pleased that our first issue of BioSocieties includes three articles devoted to the interrelated issues of psychopharmacology, enhancement, and the body. We take this as an opportunity to provide some framing remarks from the Editorial team, which might also stimulate further contributions on these issues.