This article is based on an illustrated talk I presented at the British Museum as part of the lecture series ‘Making things better’. The central exhibit in the newly opened Wellcome wing of the museum was ‘Cradle to grave’, a 40-foot table displaying in black net fabric the 14,000 pills taken by a British man and woman over their lifetimes. I trace the historical development of personhood in relation to psychotropic drugs over the last few decades in the US. ‘Pills’ or, more accurately, ‘tablets’ and ‘capsules’, are described as products of manufacturing, as means of enhancing personal capacities and as objects in exhibits. In particular, I analyze the underside of pills—their ‘side’ effects—in relation to fears and desires characteristic of contemporary US culture.

Judging from attendance records worldwide, Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds: The Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies is perhaps the most successful exhibition ever. But while it has been the subject of intense legal, ethical and cultural controversy in Europe, the exhibition has been hailed by the American press, museum curators, theologians and medical professionals as a homage to the wonders of the human body, a wonderful educational vehicle and an admonition to healthful living. The article explores this affirmative American response to Body Worlds, considering changes in the exhibition venue and presentation, as well as discourses surrounding it, that have conferred a new respectability on Body Worlds and suppressed a critical engagement with its ethical, aesthetic, ideological and economic implications.

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?

If the first half of the twentieth century was a golden age for physics, the second half saw the coming of age of the life sciences. As we enter the twenty-first century, our individual and collective lives are being fundamentally altered by developments in cellular and molecular biology. The drivers of these developments, and the stakes in them, are not merely scientific-they are therapeutic, economic, political, ideological and ethical. Put another way, developments in genomics, stem cell research, pharmacology, neuroscience all raise questions, not just about the nature of living processes and their amenability to understanding and manipulation, but also about the forces and ambitions shaping progress in the life sciences themselves, and the ways in which the life sciences are transforming different societies, locally, nationally and globally, in a multitude of different practices from the clinic to the factory.

After an interruption of almost 20 years, psychopharmacological research on hallucinogenic drugs was revived in several countries simultaneously around 1990. Most of the projects that have been initiated since then have been based on the conception of model psychosis: by administering hallucinogens to healthy test subjects, psychiatrists induce a state regarded as an artificial and temporary psychosis, which can be studied under controlled experimental conditions in the laboratory. As a model of psychosis, the hallucinogen intoxication is meant to provide important clues to schizophrenia research. This article examines the history of the concept and practice of model psychosis in order to demarcate the peculiarities of its most recent articulation in the vocabulary of cognitive neuroscience. It highlights the shift from phenomenological to biological psychiatry. The analysis contributes to an understanding of the ‘regional epistemology’ of psychopharmacology by reflecting on the question: what kind of a model is the hallucinogen model of psychosis?

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.

Genomics is a field where almost every sentence begins with the words ‘we will be able to … ’This article is based upon remarks offered at the opening of the BIOS Centre at the LSE, June 2003. When dealing with the ethics of the field, one must distinguish very carefully between impotence and chastity; it is important to distinguish between‘can’t’ and ‘won‘t‘.

The history leading up to our current situation on the basic scientific level is well known, but is worth recalling for context. In 1953, Watson and Crick published a paper in which they showed the familiar icon of our times, the double helical structure of DNA. For the first time, one could see a solution to major problems of biology and especially to major problems of genetics. More particularly, we could begin to study the chemistry of information. Chemistry, of course, could also be called very low energy physics; and so for the first time we were on the verge of a physical analysis of information in biology. As is well known, biological systems are unique complex systems in the universe in that they carry an internal description of themselves in the form of their genes. No other complex system has this property. The weather is a complex system, but you can’t clone the weather because there is no physical internal description.

In recent years, growing sociological interest has been directed towards patients’ organizations as key sites where practices of identity formation and socio-political activism intersect. This article focuses on one salient aspect of patients’ organizations: the increasingly important political and economic role they are playing in biomedical research. These forms of political activism and investment in science are often directed by the hope of speeding the processes by which cures or therapies are developed. For those affected by a range of human pathologies, the hope invested in science is not only an aspiration, but can also be thought of as having a political and economic materiality that seeks to bring to fruition the many future possibilities inherent in the science of the present. This realm of activity can be characterized as a political economy of hope in which becoming knowledgeable about science, in addition to activism, fundraising and heightening awareness of a particular disease are significant locales for helping to realize the objects of individual and collective hopes. Central to this political economy is how patients’ associations sponsor the value of transforming blood, tissue or DNA into resources for the generation of biovalue, as well attempt to shape the field of biomedical research in accordance with their collectively shared ideals.

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.

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.

Genetics for the human race was the title of a special supplement of Nature Genetics published in November 2004. This was based on a meeting held at Howard University on 15 May 2003, entitled ‘Human genome variation and “race”—the state of the science’. A month earlier, on 14 April 2003, announcing the release of the ‘essentially completed’ human genome sequence, Francis Collins, Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute had said, ‘All of this study of genotypes will have profound consequences on our understanding of race and ethnicity’ and told scientists they were obligated to translate what they learn about race, ethnicity and genetics into ‘information that will be usefully included as part of the often-contentious dialogue about race in our society’.At the heart of these concerns lay a crucial question—would the genomics of the twenty-first century resurrect,or finally lay to rest, the scientific racism that has played such a formative and bloody role in the history of our present?

We are so impressed by the present and future cornucopia of mind-altering and bodyenhancing drugs that we tend to ignore what really works, namely medical engineering. The announcement for the launch of BioSocieties runs through a list of fundamental topics from genomics to bioterrorism. Surgery barely gets a look-in under ‘biomedical and reproductive technologies’. It is fitting that ‘reproductive’ should be the other half of theheading, for those technologies also, as I have put it, really work now. Unlike surgery, they get a lot of attention because we seem to be playing around with life itself. Even so we hardly pay any attention to what really really works in the case of a husband’s infertility, namely artificial insemination by a donor.

In this article we undertake some conceptual clarification of the concepts of biopower and biopolitics, and argue for their utility in contemporary analysis. We consider Foucault's development of these concepts, and differentiate his view, which is close to ours, from the philosophical take-up of the terms by Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri. Biopower, we suggest, entails one or more truth discourses about the ‘vital’ character of living human beings; an array of authorities considered competent to speak that truth; strategies for intervention upon collective existence in the name of life and health; and modes of subjectification, in which individuals work on themselves in the name of individual or collective life or health. We argue that, while exceptional forms of biopower, especially in conditions of absolutist dictatorship, and when combined with certain technical resources, can lead to a murderous ‘thanatopolitics’—a politics of death—biopower in contemporary states takes a different form. It characteristically entails a relation between ‘letting die’ (laissez mourir) and making live (faire vivre)—that is to say strategies for the governing of life. Using examples from our own current research, we consider recent developments in biopower around three themes: race, population and reproduction, and genomic medicine.

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.

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’.

The long-standing concerns about the measurement and communication of race and ethnicity in genetic research have spilled over into the editorial columns of a growing number of biomedical journals. Nature Genetics has played a prominent role in this debate with a series of editorials published between 2000–2004, culminating in the publication of an open-access Special Issue (Genetics for the human race) in November 2004. The Special Issue brought together contemporary research on the relationship between race, ethnicity and genetic variation, and a range of views on the social and ethical implications of this research. In this article we analyse interviews with each of three the editors in charge of Nature Genetics during this period to show that scientific concerns related to the measurement and communication of race and ethnicity in genetic research had been responsible for making this a ‘special issue’ for the journal. Two broad strategies for tackling these concerns were identified from an analysis of contributions to the Special Issue: continuing to use racial and ethnic categories until such time as these become obsolete; or replacing racial and ethnic categories with alternatives based on socio-cultural and geographical ancestry. We also identified additional suggestions for improving the communication of genetic findings disaggregated by race or ethnicity, which were: developing guidelines for measurement and interpretation; and greater ‘community engagement’. We argue that neither of the broad strategies and neither of the suggestions for improving communication can be wholly effective. We suggest that this is because these proposals do not adequately confront the notion that race and ethnicity are difficult concepts to operationalize or examine in scientific research precisely because they have meanings and uses which exist beyond the domain of scientific practice or control.

A cautionary tale of technological innovation in eleventh-century Venice leads to reflection on human desire for and fear of such change. The story also shows that while individuals make choices about whether to adopt or reject technologies, their choices are social, not personal, in their effects. The vocation of social science is to help people see past both their hopes and fears of biotechnologies; in this way social science can at least deflect the advance of biotechnologies.

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.

Human genome research has indeed re-ignited the sparks of long-standing discourse and debate on the definition, measurement and existence of human ‘races‘. On the one hand, this genome revolution is increasingly challenging the notion that the groups traditionally called races are truly and innately biologically distinct (Jorde and Wooding, 2004; Tishkoff and Kidd, 2004), yet, on the other, one could argue that it is facilitating the reification of race (Duster, 2005). While it is undeniable that the latter part of the twentieth century ushered in a scientific era brimming with new technology, new data and new terminology, many elements of the ‘race and biology’ controversy are not at all new and still it appears that a resolution is not yet within reach. One might ask: ‘Why?’ ‘How will current knowledge about human genetic variation inform the treatment of race and ethnicity in science, medicine, and society?’ ‘Is it even possible to come to consensus on some of the fundamental issues?’

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.