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In September 2009, a group of social scientists from the United Kingdom, Denmark, the Netherlands, Austria, the United States and Canada met in London to discuss their experiences with fieldwork in biomedical settings, and other forms of interdisciplinary collaboration. Rather than ‘trouble shoot’, however, the objective of the workshop was to explicate the effects that such interdisciplinary collaborations have on our work and our self-understandings as social scientists. Particular attention was paid to the effects of tacit disciplinary hierarchies and (mis)communication across disciplinary and epistemological boundaries. This article summarises the main issues identified at, and main insights obtained from, the workshop, both pertaining to particular stages of carrying out fieldwork (‘getting access’, ‘inside the field’ and ‘outside again’), and to the dynamics of social science research in biomedical settings more generally.

Addressing the issues examined in the introduction, this article suggests an integrative ‘cultural biology of addiction’, which aims at encouraging a continuing dialogue between neuroscientists and those engaged in social studies of addiction. This cultural biology of addiction provides an alternative framework that brings together seemingly contradictory social-constructionist and biologically reductionist claims about addictions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this conversation, the world-renowned neurobiologist Yadin Dudai discusses the latest advances in memory research, specifically the discovery of memory ‘erasure’ associated with the inhibition of an enzyme called PKMzeta. The conversation tackles the reductionist method in scientific inquiry, the mind/brain dilemma, the problematics of animal models in memory research, and the therapeutic implications of this groundbreaking discovery.

‘Molecular biology’ emerged in the first half of the twentieth century as a fundamentally novel type of biology. Its coming into being was by no means simply a linear continuation of classical genetics, the biological Leitwissenschaft of the time, and it took much more than new methods and technologies for the new discipline to arise. In this article I outline the development of molecular biology—from its beginnings to its zenith and dissolution as a discipline in its own right—in its historical context and from an epistemological perspective.

This article explores the FBI's early efforts to develop and implement a standardized DNA profiling regime in a legal and scientific landscape shaped by strong defense challenges to the technique. Although the FBI claimed numerous times that its standardization efforts were purely ‘technical’, the FBI knew it had to create a social infrastructure that would serve to ensure the validity and reliability of the forensic DNA evidence. At the center of the system would be the FBI, serving as the obligatory, if reluctant, passage point for both technical and social exchanges. The FBI decided largely by fiat that forensic scientists based in public crime laboratories, but with little molecular biology and genetics training, bore the primary responsibility for setting standards, as well as carrying out, forensic DNA analysis. At the same time, the FBI actively excluded representatives from the private biotechnology companies that introduced the technique into the legal system, as well as the members of the defense community that were responsible for highlighting potential problems with the technique in court.

The Nuffield Report is well-written, clear, extensive and up to date, and it covers most of the major ethical issues in the field of forensic DNA analysis and database searching. The ethical analysis is thorough and based on solid theoretical ground.

Over the last decade, many European countries have sought to capitalize on the promising opportunities of human embryonic stem cell (HESC) research. Italy, in contrast, has renounced this line of research. HESC research is not altogether forbidden in Italian laboratories, but restricted and not supported by public investment. In this article, I seek to make sense of Italy's stance. I argue that the politics of human embryonic stem cell research in Italy has arisen as a consequence of the reordering of Italy's biopolitics through the ‘nationalization’ of Italian embryos. This has deprived Italian laboratories of their research material and given Italian stem cells their particular meaning.

Foot and mouth disease (FMD) ceased to be endemic—continually present—in Britain in 1889. It is reasonable to suppose that all subsequent outbreaks have had the importation of virus as their starting point. So when on 3 August this year two cases were confirmed in cattle on a farm in Surrey the origin of the virus was an immediate question. Surrey is commuter belt country. Its farms are small. They are dotted between medium-sized towns and large villages and so are not the loci of the kinds of intensive agriculture thought to be particularly at risk from exotic and imported animal diseases. But a potential source was close by, at Pirbright, only about 6 kilometres from the farm.

New opportunities for systematic collaboration between neuroscience and social science have opened up in recent years, and some of the potentials and the problems that accompany them are explored with reference to Damasio's work. Systematic collaboration and integration might yield benefits for metatheoretical, theoretical and substantive inquiry, but will be impeded by language, conceptual and methodological problems. Strategies to facilitate collaboration are discussed, and it is concluded that methodological problems will be most difficult to resolve.

In 1978, the first In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF) baby, Louise Brown, was born in the United Kingdom. In 2013, 25 years and 5 million IVF babies later, how has the world changed? How have we, as scholars, changed our way of looking at the complex interaction between biology and technology since the invention of IVF? How do kinship, gender and sex appear through the lens of IVF? These are just some of the questions posed, and brilliantly answered, by Sarah Franklin’s most recent book. Another fascinating and enlightening book, published by Elizabeth Roberts as a result of her anthropological fieldwork on IVF in Ecuador, also answers these questions in interestingly...

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 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.

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?

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 term “biosociety” has come into use to describe the impact of developments in cellular and molecular biology on culture and society. In the words of the editorial introduction to the first issue of the academic journal Biosocieties in 2006: “The drivers of these developments, and the stakes in them, are not merely scientific – they are therapeutic, economic, political, ideological and ethical … 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.” The so-called genetic revolution is one dimension of this. Keywords: bioethics; commodity; genetics; hormones and behavior; nature–nurture debate

In this interview, anthropologist Paul Rabinow and sociologist Helga Nowotny discuss interdisciplinary collaborations with life scientists and the societal role of bioethics in the context of their new publications reviewed in this issue's Books Forum.