Regulatory activities are intended to safeguard the health of citizens by ensuring that new drug therapies meet the highest standards of safety, efficacy and quality. Recent initiatives emphasize streamlining and speeding up approval, and are intent on harmonizing standards for international competitive advantage. In Canada and the United Kingdom, a second order of evaluation is necessary in order to have the costs of a federally licensed drug covered under provincial or state health insurance programmes resulting in wider patient access to potentially cost-prohibitive products. While new therapies can get approved by federal regulatory scientists based upon acceptable evidence from data meeting the standards of safety, quality and efficacy, the determination of the formulary committees, such as the UK National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), or the Canadian Common Drug Review (CDR), take into consideration the economic costs and benefits of the therapeutic agent. This analysis considers the technical-political-social-moral positions taken by various actors involved in legitimizing and contesting the effectiveness of cholinesterase inhibitors (ChEIs) for treating people with Alzheimer’s disease. It examines ambiguities in the ‘norms of appropriateness and legitimacy’ of clinician researchers, and the construction and legitimization of what is appropriate in clinical research and regulatory practices.

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.

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.

‘Molecular biology’ emerged in the first half of the twentieth century as a fundamentally novel type of biology. Its coming into being was by no means simply a linear continuation of classical genetics, the biological Leitwissenschaft of the time, and it took much more than new methods and technologies for the new discipline to arise. In this article I outline the development of molecular biology—from its beginnings to its zenith and dissolution as a discipline in its own right—in its historical context and from an epistemological perspective.

The autism spectrum disorders are a group of neurodevelopmental syndromes of communication, behavior and social cognition. Over the past decade, they have received increasing attention from scholars in the social sciences. This research has been motivated by the prospect of critiquing and improving support services and therapies, by self-advocates who have argued that autism should be tolerated as a form of difference rather than treated as a disorder, and by the interest inherent in syndromes that seem to affect many of the attributes that we use to define personhood. In this commentary, I review social science research on the autism spectrum. I identify some key approaches in the work, including the idea of autism as a culture, transcultural comparisons, studies based on treatment strategies, investigations of subjectivity and interpersonal relations, and research on social movements. In the process, I suggest some further directions for this area of research. I also consider some reasons why the autism spectrum disorders are a particularly interesting site for studies of the ways that biomedical information is used to craft individual and group identities.