We have argued throughout the book that attempts to fathom the depths of life by examining our flesh and blood create new opportunities and imperatives for the State. Through developments in biotechnology, the moral domains of deviance, normality, crime and punishment, even the making of socially useful human capital, can potentially be turned into technical matters to be sorted and shaped. Prevention and surveillance go under the skin and into the womb. We have shown how processes within scientific communities affect the ways in which findings from animal studies may be applied to human populations. Citation practices, for example, critically affect what is asked in subsequent research, and contestable findings can become rewritten as fundamental truths. Thus, research becomes ‘path dependent’, a furrow is ploughed, cow-paths are paved and commitment to a particular knowledge quest escalates. The research funding follows and makes the rut longer and deeper, the ‘facts’ get made, told and retold; the memes reproduce themselves. The structures that are created, constrain more than they enable.

In this final chapter, we raise questions about whether the neurological and molecular levels, the actions and processes within and between cells, are the most rich and appropriate domains to guide the actions of the State. The consequences of the prevailing moral and scientific settlements, we will argue, are that preferred policy responses are individualised and increasingly medicalised. A preoccupation with prevention, early intervention and particular forms of evidence are squeezing out conversations about different, and potentially more desirable and sustainable, actions to make people's lives better. Choices are being made about who to help, who needs to change and how money is spent on creating a better world. Notions of vulnerability and damage are double edged; possibly more resources flow, but these dispensations are conditional on ‘compliance’, ‘engagement’ and surveillance.