This article examines the history of Haitian-owned freighters that have been trading between Haiti and the Miami River since the 1970s, how this shipping economy became racialized in ways that marked it and the river with a “threatening” Haitian Blackness, and how local government agencies, real estate developers, and law enforcement officials worked to remake the aesthetics of the river as something other than Haitian and Black. Projects to re-racialize the riverway played with the spurious surface-and-subsurface spatial logic of racial discourses more generally—that is, the mistaken but widely-held belief that visible, physical markers of race reveal hidden capacities and propensities. Policing that pushed Haitian commerce into an economy of containerization—a race- and class-marked shipping technology on the river—allowed the Haiti trade to “pass” as non-Haitian on a gentrifying waterway. Law enforcement programs that seized and sank Haitian freighters to create artificial reefs off the Florida coast bluewashed the river’s surface and its ethnoracially coded, “polluting” vessels by transforming them into subsurface, “White” recreational ecologies. These processes reveal how politically fraught contests over racialization recruit layered material environments as part of larger projects of policing, re-racialization, and urban renewal. In exploring this history, the article pushes against arguments from some quarters for a “post-critical” turn by demonstrating that reflexive critique, with its focus on the hidden and the submerged, remains necessary for grasping the ways racialization processes operate through structures of material and discursive layering.

Contemporary understanding of the mechanisms of disease increasingly points to examples of “genetic diseases” with an infectious component and of “infectious diseases” with a genetic component. Such blurred boundaries generate ethical, legal, and social issues and highlight historical contexts that must be examined when incorporating host genomic information into the prevention, outbreak control, and treatment of infectious diseases.

This paper describes the results of a multi-country survey of governance approaches for the use of digital contact tracing (DCT) in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that the countries in our survey represent two distinct models of DCT governance, both of which are flawed. The “data protection model” emphasizes privacy protections at the expense of public health benefit, while the “emergency response model” sacrifices transparency and accountability, prompting concerns about excessive governance surveillance. The ethical and effective use of DCT in the future requires a new governance approach that is better suited to this novel use of mobile phone data to promote public health.”

Nanomedicine is yielding new and improved treatments and diagnostics for a range of diseases and disorders. Nanomedicine applications incorporate materials and components with nanoscale dimensions (often defined as 1-100 nm, but sometimes defined to include dimensions up to 1000 nm, as discussed further below) where novel physiochemical properties emerge as a result of size-dependent phenomena and high surface-to-mass ratio. Nanotherapeutics and in vivo nanodiagnostics are a subset of nanomedicine products that enter the human body. These include drugs, biological products (biologics), implantable medical devices, and combination products that are designed to function in the body in ways unachievable at larger scales. Nanotherapeutics and in vivo nanodiagnostics incorporate materials that are engineered at the nanoscale to express novel properties that are medicinally useful. These nanomedicine applications can also contain nanomaterials that are biologically active, producing interactions that depend on biological triggers. Examples include nanoscale formulations of insoluble drugs to improve bioavailability and pharmacokinetics, drugs encapsulated in hollow nanoparticles with the ability to target and cross cellular and tissue membranes (including the bloodbrain barrier) and to release their payload at a specific time or location, imaging agents that demonstrate novel optical properties to aid in locating micrometastases, and antimicrobial and drug-eluting components or coatings of implantable medical devices such as stents.

Researchers, institutional review boards (IRBs), participants in human subjects research, and their families face an important but largely neglected problem — how should incidental findings (IFs) be managed in human subjects research. If researchers unexpectedly stumble upon information of potential health or reproductive significance, should they seek expert evaluation, contact the participant’s physician, tell the research participant, or respond with some combination? What should consent forms and the entire consent process say about how IFs will be handled in research? What should IRBs require?

Genetic testing poses fundamental questions for insurance. Testing can predict a low probability of future illness and disability, which can help promote the insurability of individuals with a family history of genetic risk, but it can also invite insurers to reject applicants, increase premiums, exclude people with certain illnesses and disabilities, and otherwise adjust the underwriting processes for individuals with certain genotypes. In the workplace, these issues may cause employers who offer or pay for insurance to alter their hiring behavior, either by selecting those with desirable genetic makeup or rejecting, dismissing, or reassigning those who carry an unwanted risk, ultimately threatening employability and the safety net that insurance is intended to provide.