This article discusses how cultural concepts of marriage and reproduction play a primary role in how genetic disorders are regarded in Japan. The article examines the anxieties that accompany the taking of genetic tests in the context of Japanese cultural concepts of family, care and genetic disorders. The analysis draws on data from two studies conducted over two years (2006–2008), based on semi-structured interviews with individuals affected by a genetic disorder, and a study of prenatal decision-making as regards the taking of tests during pregnancy, which also involved interviews with medical professionals, including certified clinical geneticists, genetic counsellors and scholars. A number of studies, as well as governmental documents, have emphasized the importance of respecting culture in dealing with a genetic disorder and genetic information. Though we regard respect for culture as important, we show that respect for culture might hide superstitions and culturally embedded prejudices about genetic disorders. We show this by analysing the given motivations of couples for taking a genetic test and by tracing the ways in which ‘genetic information’ is understood in a socio-cultural context.

This article locates the beginnings of a synthetic biology network and thereby probes the formation of a potential disciplinary community. We consider the ways that ideas of community are mobilized, both by scientists and policy-makers in building an agenda for new forms of knowledge work, and by social scientists as an analytical device to understand new formations for knowledge production. As participants in, and analysts of, a network in synthetic biology, we describe our current understanding of synthetic biology by telling four tales of community making. The first tale tells of the mobilization of synthetic biology within a European context. The second tale describes the approach to synthetic biology community formation in the UK. The third narrates the creation of an institutionally based, funded ‘network in synthetic biology’. The final tale de-localizes community-making efforts by focussing on ‘devices’ that make communities. In tying together these tales, our analysis suggests that the potential community can be understood in terms of ‘movements’—the (re)orientation and enrolment of people, stories, disciplines and policies; and of ‘stickiness’—the objects and glues that begin to bind together the various constitutive elements of community.

The creation and use of transpecies human-animal embryos for research has figured prominently in recent highly controversial changes to UK reproductive legislation. This article reflects on the debate in the UK parliamentary context, drawing on socio-anthropological writing on hybridity. It seeks to make sense of two related cultural contradictions evident in the debate. First, a paradoxical position has been taken over decades in which the law simultaneously bans and yet permits the production of transpecies embryos. Second, key stakeholders have based their arguments on the simultaneous differentiation and dedifferentiation of embryos. Attempts to distinguish between different classes of embryo (cybrids, chimeras, pure hybrids, etc.) have been in tension with pressures to homogenize all embryos as morally equal. The article explores both of these contradictory tensions in the debate and their significance for the regulation and oversight of reproductive research.

This article addresses how people who handle transgenic animals in practice—laboratory workers and members of animal ethics committees—talk about and handle dilemmas with transgenic animals. It is shown how dilemmas associated with transgenic animals become back-grounded through rhetorical comparisons with ‘something else’. Through these comparisons, transgenic animals are framed as normal, ordinary and thereby unproblematic on the one hand, and as valuable treasures in which are embedded hopes and expectations of future medical treatments on the other. This tension builds up to a discourse on transgenic mice as ordinary treasures. Towards the end of the article we discuss how this discourse tends to exclude possibilities of discussing specific dilemmas of genetically modified animals. Instead the discourse is contributing to certain transgenic silences. This article is based on the project ‘Dilemmas with transgenic animals’, in which notions of culture and nature, risk and safety, innovation and organism, science and technology, are investigated in the scientific production, use and ethical evaluation of transgenic animals. The project builds on case studies in two different contexts: laboratories and animal ethics committees. The methods used are interviews and ethnographic fieldwork.

This article deals with recent changes in UK guidance on clinical waste, in particular a shift to disposable, single-use instruments and sharps. I use interviews conducted with nurses from a GP practice and two clinical waste managers at alternative treatment and incineration sites as a springboard for reflection on the relationship between the legislation on clinical waste management and its implementation. Scrutinizing the UK guidance, European legislation and World Health Organization principles, I draw out interviewees’ concerns that the changed practices lead to an expansion of the hazardous waste category, with an increased volume going to incineration. This raises questions regarding the regulations’ environmental and health effects, and regarding the precautionary approach embedded in the regulations. Tracing the diverse reverberations of the term ‘waste’ in different points along the journeys made by sharps in particular, and locating these questions in relation to existing literature on waste, I emphasize that public health rationales for the new practices are not made clear in the guidance. I suggest that this relative silence on the subject conceals both the uncertainties regarding the necessity for these means of managing the risks of infectious waste, and the tensions between policies of precautionary public health and environmental sustainability.

This article studies how our understanding of population-level disease transmission has evolved over time. The main question is: what happens to ‘facts’ in the course of their life history? The concept of life history captures the process that shapes the facts of disease transmission, mobilizes them via mathematical and graphical representations, and allows them to evolve and change over time. Hence, this concept provides continuity from knowledge production to utilization. Life history is developed through phases in the ‘lives’ of ‘facts’: birth and youth, adulthood and reproductive years, and old age. The life-history approach consists of a set of ‘facts’ binding together knowledge of a disease, its routes of transmission, and the susceptibility of the exposed population; it thus provides an adequate framework to explore the complex nature of population-level disease transmission. The analytical focus of this article is concerned with how these ‘facts’ are disseminated via model-based or mathematical representations. Just as life histories are stories full of interactions, surprises and struggles, this article highlights the underlying contingencies in the dissemination and accumulation of factual knowledge.

In the Netherlands, the opposition between advocates of embryo selection (preimplantation genetic diagnosis, PGD) and opponents seeking to ban PGD altogether escalated in May and June 2008, shortly after the State Secretary of Health proposed to rescind the ban on PGD for hereditary breast cancer. The clash between the Social Democratic Labour Party and the Reformed Christian Party, both represented in the Dutch Parliament, was ultimately settled in a quite friendly atmosphere. The active engagement in the debate of women and some men with a family history of hereditary breast cancer, who wrote or told their personal stories to the media, may have helped solve the conflict. In this article, I identify the stories of suffering and the arguments for or against PGD that BRCA mutation carriers made public in response to the controversy. Subsequently, the empirical findings are interpreted in light of political theories on the role of storytelling in political discourse. Deborah Stone’s recognition that storytelling is part and parcel of all political discourse and Iris Marion Young’s analysis of what stories do are used to evaluate the transformative effect that the real-life stories had in the Dutch public debate on PGD for hereditary breast cancer.

Exchange of material originating in human bodies is essential to many health technologies but potentially conflicts with a prominent moral ideal according to which human bodies and their parts are beyond trade. In this article, I suggest that the inclination to keep bodies apart from ‘commercial exchange’ has significant implications for the way their parts come to be exchanged. The analysis revolves around two versions of the hip: one prosthetic version made of metal and one version made of bone, the femoral head, which is excised in conjunction with hip replacements and later used for transplantation. How are exchange systems for something moving in and out of human beings organized? Who provides what and who receives what? When and where does money change hands? How are the specific amounts determined? By answering these questions, I provide a description of the exchange form that avoids assuming it to be simply a ‘market’ or a ‘gift economy’. I focus on the mechanisms that allow money to be generated despite the moral ideal viewing body parts as beyond trade—or, rather, the how the ideal facilitates mechanisms through which money can be generated without being viewed as profit. In particular, I suggest that ‘compensation’ is an important example of a mechanism in need of further scrutiny.

In this article, I address the enduring American interest in the manipulation and eradication of the need for human sleep through the powers of science. In particular, I focus on military research regarding the possible reduction of necessary sleep times as well as historical attempts to modify and maximize the scheduling of warfare; these military efforts are juxtaposed to the efforts of sports professionals who have attempted to test the limits of human sleep, either for scientific concerns or for that of victory. These various scientific pursuits are compared to science fictional representations of the eradication of human sleep, or its significant modification. I argue that it is not solely the actual realization of sleep’s modification that impacts dominant understandings of sleep, but rather that the fantasies of science’s powers reconfigure conceptions of the human and its limitations.

One of the big success stories in synthetic biology is the re-engineering of an existing organism to produce the anti-malarial drug artemisinin. The drug is also found naturally in extracts of the plant Artemisia annua (Wormwood), but demand is far oustripping supply and extracting the drug from the plants is complex, time-consuming and expensive. In this lecture, Jay Keasling describes how he and his laboratory re-designed yeast microbes into living mini anti-malaria drug factories producing artemisinin more cheaply and efficiently. The lecture was given at the 12 May 2009 launch of the Imperial-based Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation—established in partnership with the London School of Economics and funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) as part of a science and innovation award.

In this lecture, Pam Silver describes some of the exciting work her laboratory has carried out in synthetic biology and illustrates how engineers are not only bringing new tools to traditional biology but also a new perspective. Traditional biology has emphasized understanding the causes and mechanisms of biological processes, but bioengineers put that knowledge to practical use. Our progress in understanding life, particularly the detailed molecular biology of cells, coupled with new technologies and computing power, is starting to transform biology from a ‘soft’ science focused on description to a ‘hard’ science focused on quantifying, predicting and controlling its properties. The lecture was given at the 12 May 2009 launch of the Imperial-based Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation—established in partnership with the London School of Economics and funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) as part of a science and innovation award.

This article examines the historical roots of synthetic biology, highlighting the multiple meanings and understandings of the term. Synthetic biology as it is used today refers to an especially wide range of endeavors, embodying an equally wide range of aims, and having correspondingly various relations to the activities generally included in the discipline of biology. To address the question of what synthetic biology has to do with biology, this article illustrates some of the ways in which the entanglement of synthetic biology as the epitome of technoscience and synthetic biology as an alternative, artificial biology plays out in three different examples of synthetic biology—one current and two historical.

The scientific community has shown unusual leadership in early and proactive identification of some of the social, environmental, ethical and security concerns raised by synthetic biology. The current influx of social scientists focusing their attention on the technology has, however, broadened the concerns and challenges of synthetic biology and, to some extent, altered the focus of the debate about social context. This article provides a snapshot of some of the main events and discussions that have taken place in the United Kingdom over the last few months on socio-political aspects of synthetic biology.