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Sensing In/Security investigates how sensors and sensing practices enact regimes of security and insecurity. It extends long-standing concerns with infrastructuring to emergent modes of surveillance and control by exploring how digitally networked sensors shape securitisation practices. Contributions in this volume examine how sensing devices gain political and epistemic relevance in various forms of in/security, from border control, regulation, and epidemiological tracking, to aerial surveillance and hacking. Instead of focusing on specific sensory devices and their consequences, this volume explores the complex and sometimes invisible political, cultural and ethical processes of infrastructuring in/security.

As innovation is increasingly becoming an imperative for policymakers around the globe, there is a growing tendency to frame policy problems as problems of innovation. This logic suggests that we are unable to address grand societal challenges and ensure economic competitiveness because our societies, institutions, scientific activities or individual predispositions are not sufficiently geared towards innovation. In this paper, we analyze this “deficit model” of innovation in which a lack of innovation is routinely invoked as the main obstacle to social progress. Drawing parallels to research on the deficit model of public understanding of science (PUS), we develop a theoretical framework that captures the dynamics and normative implications of deficit construction, highlighting five salient dimensions: problem diagnoses, proposed remedies, the role of expertise, implied social orders, and measures of success. We apply this framework to three empirical case studies of recent innovation strategies in Luxembourg, Singapore, and Denmark. Attention to this deficit framing around innovation is important, we argue, because it is an essential part of how innovation transforms societies in the 21st century: not only through new technological possibilities or economic growth, but also by shaping public discourse, narrowing policy options, and legitimizing major institutional interventions. The implied pro-innovation bias tends to marginalize other rationales, values, and social functions that do not explicitly support innovation. It further delegates decisions about sweeping social reconfigurations to innovation experts, which raises questions of accountability and democratic governance. Experiences from the history of PUS suggest that, without a dedicated effort to transform innovation policy into a more democratic, inclusive, and explicitly political field, the present deficit logic and its technocratic overtones risks significant social and political conflict.

Biobanking in Singapore is characterized by contested relations between funding ambitions and research practices, and different notions of what the (potential) value of storing samples and data for medical research is. Different biobanking efforts anticipate the production of public goods from stored materials in specifically situated ways. These efforts to produce public goods in the form of scientific and economic value can be fruitfully understood in terms of extraction, a complex sociotechnical process of retrieving (potential) value from raw materials, which both informs and is informed by specific social values. In exploring the extraction of potential value in relation to practice values, I propose the notion of value formations to account for the coproduction of and intersections between different forms of value(s) in scientific practices situated in particular social contexts. I trace value formations across the life span of biobanking collections, which range from recruitment, collection, and processing of samples to their storage, retrieval, and use. Observations along this life span show the social and temporal complexity of value-making in biobanking in Singapore, pointing to the contextual specificity of how biobanking is understood as a public good.

The social implications of recent developments in the life sciences have widely been theorized in terms of ‘biological citizenship’; a notion that suggests that claims on collective resources are increasingly brought forward by groups of individuals organized around shared molecular biological characteristics, outside of traditional institutional formations centered on the state. In this paper, I propose to amend this notion by situating biological citizenship in its specific context of emergence. I suggest that the notion of molecular biological citizenship from below, with its focus on individual responsibility for disease risks, was in part facilitated by the development of ideas of individual responsibility for phenotypic ‘risk factors’ in the government-funded Framingham Heart Study in the United States. I reconstruct how the federal government retreated from direct operational responsibility for the Study, defined and maintained the boundaries of the population and contributed particular risk-based notions of life over more than six decades of cardiovascular disease research. I suggest that government, population, and life as defined in the Study are indispensable for contemporary notions of biological citizenship and that analysts need to attend to these situated origins in order to productively understand biological citizenship in relation to wider transformations of citizenship at present.

This article investigates why the Singapore Tissue Network (STN) was closed, despite the government’s continued interest in the economic potential of biomedical research, to which this repository had been expected to contribute. This article engages with the STN as a research infrastructure that was designed to serve Singapore’s sociotechnical imaginary of economic development based on technological advancement, but did not align with practitioners’ views of how tissue storage contributes to knowledge making. By exploring tensions around the collection of tissue, exchange, and value in the STN, this article proposes that projections of usefulness onto the collected materials conflicted with practitioners’ perspective on the production of usefulness through engagement with these materials. This discrepancy points to the tensions between imaginaries of the purposes of tissue collection in research practice and science policy, raising the question how different perspectives on how to make research infrastructures useful may be aligned.

While developments in genetic medicine are widely considered to bring forward pressing policy challenges, the question how genetic diagnostics are integrated into and distributed within existing health-care infrastructures has virtually been ignored. This paper addresses the distribution of genetic diagnostics through the framework of bioconstitutionalism, which suggests that basic categories for the allocation of rights and duties in law and policymaking are redefined together with and through specific scientific and technological ways of understanding and intervening in life. The paper thus analyzes the coproduction of diagnostic and distributive approaches to familial hypercholesterolemia (FH), a hereditary form of high cholesterol, in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Germany. It describes how a commitment to a genetically narrow screening program in the Netherlands reflects a commitment to providing care to specific subcommunities of people at risk; how a broad and predominantly phenotypic unde...

This chapter explores the production of value in population biobanks beyond their economic potential. Aarden uses the metaphor of ‘social contracts ’ to highlight the role of mutual expectations and commitments between science and society in producing value from population research. The chapter investigates three population research projects. It describes how the Singapore Tissue Network aimed to collect tissue for economic purposes at the expense of its contributions to medical knowledge-making; how the Million Death Study in India that seeks to generate reliable mortality statistics reduces the social complexity of causes of death to diagnostic data ; and how the Framingham Heart Study in the United States has for decades defined cardiovascular disease risks primarily in terms of individual responsibility. While these projects each serve contextually specific objectives, they share a technocratic perspective on public health with broader promises of the bioeconomy .

For advanced high strength steels for automotive application, the time between materials development and regular use in cars, trucks and similar vehicles is rather short. In contradiction to this, hot rolled plates made of high strength low alloy steels which have been developed many years ago still do not find application fields in structural steelwork although they offer impressive mechanical properties. In this paper we argue that inadequate design rules in civil and mechanical engineering prevent such modern high strength steels from displaying their lightweight potential. A technological approach to the problem presented in this paper is to apply damage mechanics models together with probabilistic safety concepts for derivation of new improved safety factors. However, a major obstacle in this process is that these new safety factors will have to be included in the design standards. The development of such standards contains both institutional and epistemic obstacles to including alternative safety models. Taking standardization in Europe as an example, the standardization committee is characterized by both national interest representation and attempts to stimulate European integration and competitiveness. At the epistemic level, different understandings of what counts as evidence for material safety may challenge and postpone adoption of new calculative models. Institutionalization and epistemology thus contribute to a framework for standardization that needs to be questioned in order for new approaches to be accepted. Such questioning cannot be done on the basis of developing new calculation models alone, but needs a clear social component of building coalitions around the inclusion of new considerations, for example those related to sustainability.

This article presents an innovative approach to interpreting and mending political discussions on sensitive medical-ethical issues. It adopts the idiom of co-production, which presumes that technological and political choices shape our world simultaneously, and in turn cannot be seen apart from the background that they themselves help shape. By developing the idea of a nexus, this connection between technological and political practices is further conceptualized. Through an analysis of debates on pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), this article describes the constitution of the embryo in two countries. In Germany, the embryo is seen as a full member of the human community. In contrast, in the Netherlands the embryo is largely invisible. This difference connects to radically divergent moral decisions, technological configurations and political arrangements. In turn, these different configurations reproduce particular constitutions of the embryo. The article concludes that discussions about PGD gain transparency by breaking down the relations between political and technological practices into various levels. Each of these levels offers its own way to see the embryo as a nexus between practices of politics and practices of science and technology.

Moderne Geschossbauten erfordern ganzheitliche und nachhaltige Gebaudekonzepte, die ein hohes Mas an Nutzungsflexibilitat und Multifunktionalitat bieten und somit die Bauwerkslebensdauer und -wirtschaftlichkeit erhohen. Dabei spielen die Geschossdecken eine grose Rolle. In diesem Beitrag wird die Entwicklung eines innovativen Verbunddeckensystems dargestellt, das sich durch grose Spannweiten sowie optimierte bauphysikalische und brandschutztechnische Eigenschaften auszeichnet und zudem die vollstandige Integration gebaudetechnischer Anlagen mit zugehoriger Installationsfuhrung in die Tragkonstruktion ermoglicht. Im Vorfeld des vorgestellten Forschungsprojektes wurde bereits ein Evaluierungsprozess von Verbunddeckensystemen durchgefuhrt [1]. Integrated and sustainability-oriented ceilings in steel and composite. Modern multi-storey buildings require holistic and sustainable building conceptions to ensure a high degree of flexibility of use and multi-functionality and augment the economic structure life. In this paper, the development of an innovative composite floor system is outlined, which is characterized by large spans and improved physical and fire protection properties and also allows complete integration of HVACR installations in the supporting structure. In the run-up of the proposed research project an evaluation process of composite floor systems has been conducted [1].

Solidarity is widely described as one of the leading principles for the public provision of health care in Western Europe and is therefore prominently discussed in debates on the introduction of genetic technologies in national health care provision arrangements. However, solidarity is often defined in an essentialist and quantitative way, which does very little to show the complexities of and changes in health care allocation. In this paper we therefore propose to analyze solidarity as a value that is reproduced in practices of providing health care. This means that we analyzed how three particular genetic technologies are incorporated in basic health care provision in Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom and how individuals or groups at risk get access to them. On the basis of a characterization of the distributive mechanisms in these three countries, we argue for a discussion on genetics and solidarity that pays attention to the complexity and specificity of practices in the analysis and politics of solidarity.

In recent years, preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) has developed into a routine diagnostic procedure in health care. Although during this process, several initiatives have been employed to regulate the procedure, access to PGD may be hampered by the diversity in health-care arrangements or therapeutic cultures in different countries. This article demonstrates how PGD provision practices depend on much more than regulation alone, by providing an in-depth comparative analysis of the provision of PGD in Britain, the Netherlands and Germany. In analysing regulation, organization, selection of indications, and mechanisms and criteria for reimbursement, differences between these countries can be identified. This is important, since differences in PGD provision can have enormous consequences for the access of individual patients in different countries. Somewhat paradoxically, this article concludes that even though differences in access do have serious consequences, they also serve the establishment of PGD. Developing access to PGD in national 'therapeutic cultures' can contribute to making PGD routine health care in a way that may not be achievable by harmonizing regulation.

Approaches in comparative policy analysis have so far focused on the understanding of actors, institutions and their positions in the policy-making process. More recent work attempts to enrich comparative policy analysis by taking the social context and culture into account, in order to do justice to the relevance of policy context for policy content. However, the object or content of policy making has so far largely remained a black box. In this article we aim to open up this black box by studying the provision of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) in the Netherlands, Germany and Britain in terms of co-evolution. Co-evolution refers to the intricate development of a policy together with its content, in this case genetic technologies such as PGD. We demonstrate how co-evolution has led to specific technological arrangements in these three countries: a specific technical version of PGD to deal with restrictive legislation in Germany, to a well-funded PGD with insecure indications in the Neth...

In this chapter, we will provide an outline of science and technology studies (STS), including a comparative view on technology assessment (TA), seeing the two as distinct yet related fields of inquiry. We will thus not elaborate on the different institutional contexts that have shaped the respective developments of TA and STS.

Aims: Considerable progress in public health is expected to occur from the application of genomic knowledge and technologies. This is the subject of a newly emerging field of public health genomics. In this paper we analyze differences in how public health genomics is developing in the Netherlands, the UK and Germany through the definition and diagnosis of familial hypercholesterolaemia (FH), an inherited predisposition for coronary heart disease. Methods: We analyzed the emergence of public health genomics within the framework of a project on the incorporation of genetics in western European healthcare schemes. Our analysis is based on document analysis and in-depth interviews. Results: In the Netherlands, public health genomics takes shape through a genetic screening programme for FH, looking for mutations on two specific genes; in the UK it emerges through a strategy of ‘‘mainstreaming’’ genetics in health care that aims to identify hereditary predispositions by means of phenotypic diagnosis; and in Germany public health genomics is elaborated at a conceptual level, leaving a diagnosis of FH to individual physicians who occasionally prescribe genetic testing. Conclusions: Our analysis shows how public health genomics gets constituted differently in different countries and, moreover, produces particular patterns of inclusion and exclusion from care. These patterns indicate a paradox in public health genomics, which consists of an inverse relationship between the use of advanced molecular genetic testing technologies and the number and variety of individuals at risk included in the target population. This paradox presents a challenge for professionals and policy makers in public health genomics.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, predictive forms of medicine, largely associated with genetics, have become increasingly prominent. This has given rise to questions about the social consequences of this development, for example with regard to the distribution of health care access. Drawing on qualitative interviews with clinic staff and public officials and on document analyses, we analyse how access to risk assessment and monitoring for hereditary breast cancer predispositions in Germany, the Netherlands and England is produced through the interaction of risk classification and health care organisation. For each of the three countries, we show how particular combinations of genetic testing and family history data, classification of risks and allocation of monitoring services in practice contribute to specific forms of inclusion and exclusion. Thus, we show how risk assessment and monitoring in Germany attributes a large role to genetic testing; how family history information plays a large role in the Netherlands; and how regional differences in health care have a significant influence in England. On the basis of our case study, we argue that health care organisation is an important facet of the allocation of health care access, as it plays an important role in mediating the influence of risk assessment technologies and risk categories in health care access. We conclude that the allocation of risk assessment and monitoring in predictive medicine deserve more extensive political attention.

In an Editorial (Jan 29, p 353), you express concern about the eff ects of the Health and Social Care Bill on the UK’s National Health Service (NHS). In claiming that the introduction of fi nancial considerations in clinical decision making (through so-called clinically led commissioning) might signal the end of the NHS, you take sides in the long-running debate about the costs and benefi ts of competition in health care. Although such debates about the pros and cons of market mechanisms mostly revolve around abstract arguments, our empirical study of the eff ects of market reforms introduced in the Netherlands in 2005 suggests a mixed picture. The role of purchasing care on behalf of patients, attributed to insurance companies in the Netherlands, proves diffi cult in practice. Insurance com panies have very limited insight into the cost structure and quality of hospitals, which hampers them in their responsibility to reduce costs and improve quality. Simultaneously, the redistribution of responsibilities has not led to less, but to more, state involvement to prevent the rise of overall costs and to safeguard hospitals from bankruptcy. Although there are substantial diff erences between the Netherlands and the UK in health-care organisation, the Dutch experiences presented here suggest that one of the main challenges for NHS reforms will be fi nding a balance between relocating responsibilities for service cost and quality, while assuring that the NHS is future-proof—with attention to the possible mixed eff ects of reforms.