In October 2010, Celia, Adrian and Maggie met in the Sociology Department coffee room at Lancaster University to discuss what to do after Celia had received a rather unusual email. The message was from ‘Intel Labs’, not an organisation that we had heard of, although, of course, we knew about the Intel Corporation. It contained a call for proposals for a three-year research programme called ‘Biosensors in Everyday Life’; it seemed that Intel Labs wanted to know more about the possible uses and usabilities of what appeared to be a revolutionary new trend in the approach of ‘middle-class users’ to acquiring health-related knowledge about their bodies.

None of us had ever had research funding from a commercial technology company before and the programme was intriguing for us as researchers in the Science and Technology Studies field. Celia and Maggie had just finished working on a European study of ‘remote-care’ technologies and Adrian had been working on the data-intensive transformations of genomics. Celia's background in feminist studies of reproduction, sexuality and biomedicine, Adrian's in philosophy of technology and software studies, and Maggie's in technological change in health care and forms of public engagement and participation, all seemed to tell us that we should make a response to the approach from Intel Labs.

We decided to propose a project that would push at what seemed to be Intel's primary interest in middle-class users by opening up questions around two areas of contemporary social concern – infertility/conception and personal genetic testing – for which we offered to supervise two doctoral studies. To this, we added a third element: a parallel cross-cutting initiative to try to understand the public's (in addition to middle-class users’) views about these developments. We thought that if the proposal gained favour with Intel Labs, then the research would be worthwhile and, we hoped, socially useful. If not, little would be lost.

In the event, we formed a productive and educative relationship with Intel Labs, and discovered that it employed talented and critical anthropologists with whom we went on to have great discussions. Our initial fears about corporate influence over our work proved unfounded, and at Lancaster, we decided to form the Living Data Research Group (see: www.livingdata. wordpress.com/about-us/) as our group expanded to include Mette Kragh-Furbo and Joann Wilkinson undertaking their PhD studies.