Biosocieties最新文献

The sciences of environmental epigenetics and the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease have become central in efforts to understand how early life experiences impact health across the life course. This paper draws on interviews with epigenetic scientists and laboratory observations in the United States and Canada to show how scientists conceptualize epigenetic biomarkers as molecular vestiges of early life and the consequences this has for postgenomic approaches to health, risk, and intervention. We argue that this process demarcates early life as the optimal time to study and intervene in health and positions biomarkers as conceptual and methodological tools that scientists mobilize to reimagine early life environments. These environments include Positive Childhood Experiences (PCEs), which reflect an emergent and increasingly prominent epistemic object in behavioral epigenetics. Though distinct from widespread research on Early Life Adversity, we show how PCEs continue to essentialize experience in gendered and individualized ways. Further, this paper suggests that focusing on biomarkers as molecular vestiges of early life allows scientists to create stability despite ongoing epistemological and biological unknowns in epigenetics and DOHaD. Our findings contribute new perspectives to social studies of epigenetics, biomarkers, and the production of novel epistemic objects in postgenomic knowledge practices.

The article brings together two disparate and so far largely disconnected bodies of research: the critical analysis of cryopreservation technologies and the debate on modes of anticipation. It starts with a short review of the state of the research on the concept of cryopolitics. In the next part I will suggest two revisions. I will problematize the idea of latent life and the focus on potentialities that have been central to the research on cryopolitics so far, proposing to shift the analytic frame to suspended life on the one hand and to modes of anticipation on the other. I argue that cryopreservation practices are part of contemporary technologies of anticipation. They are linked to a politics of suspension by mobilizing a liminal biological state in which frozen organisms or biological material are neither fully alive nor ultimately dead. This seeks to avert and/or enable distinctive futures by extending temporal horizons and keeping vital processes in limbo.

Following recent discussions around suspended life, this paper focuses on an endeavor that sought to arrest biological material in time and space and render it available on demand. It depicts the attempt to establish a collection of cryopreserved donated cells. The study offers rare insights into how this initiative was at odds with familiar politics significant in its field, those of innovation and preparedness, and therefore was suspended itself. In identifying parallels with accounts of unsuccessful biobanks, the paper makes a case for the analytical value of considering ill-fated projects of suspension along with those that prosper and attract public attention. The case of a novel cryo-collection, in particular, demonstrates how the idea and practice of suspension only gathers political momentum when it serves other well-established rationales. As such, it prompts two important conclusions. First, the power to arrest life as it comes with cryotechnologies is much more likely to unravel in entrenched constellations than to carry transformative or disruptive potential. Second, however, the paper also exemplifies that projects of suspension are not necessarily doomed to serve hegemonic ways of governing life. It advocates for preventing such mismatches from falling into oblivion.

This article investigates 20 years of discursive struggles in Nordic medical journals around the process of legitimating and routinising gestational surrogacy and uterus transplantation in Finland and Sweden. The comparative analysis through critical discourse analysis suggests that influential health care professionals have contributed to different levels of legal and cultural adaptation of the methods, prioritising non-commercial gestational surrogacy in Finland and uterus transplantation in Sweden. The article identifies central discursive turning points in the medical journal discussions by interpreting them against the background of medical and policy developments in Finland and Sweden during the analysed twenty-year period. Legitimation and routinisation of surrogacy and uterus transplantation were developed through biomedicalisation by representing them as infertility treatments and emphasising the relational dynamics between donors and recipients—a connection that in the Nordic context is often based on kinship or close relationships. The diagnosis of absolute uterine factor infertility was central to representing women as on the boundary between fertile and infertile, as they may have functioning ovaries. Through the biomedicalised rhetoric of equal opportunities for biogenetic motherhood, the diagnosed women’s ambiguous reproductive status was used to legitimise the two methods as cures for absolute infertility, thereby reinforcing hegemonic family and kinship norms.

This article analyses how people who identify with psychiatric diagnoses in England and Wales make sense of and talk about their experiences of sexual violence. I examine how interview participants engaged with the hegemonic trauma discourse, as well as the consequences of this for meaning-making, affective pain, and the feminist imperative to ‘speak out’. The hegemonic trauma discourse is characterised by leaving a psychological ‘scar’; is premised on a sudden interruption to a ‘good life’; and is considered pathologically unspeakable without intervention. This discourse was both validating and affectively painful for participants, and interventions targeting dissociation were helpful for assuaging distress. However, it was additionally normative and exclusionary, and did not fulfil the political promise of ‘speaking out’, as all participants faced myriad socio-political denial.

What can’t freezing hold still? This article surveys the history of substances used to protect cells and organisms from freezing damage, known as cryoprotectants. Dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) has since 1959 been the most widely used of these agents in cryopreservation. Here, its evolution from pulp and paper waste byproduct to wonder drug to all-but-invisible routine element of freezing protocols is used to trace the direct arc from protection to toxicity in theories of how and why cryoprotectants work, from the 1960s to today. The power of these agents to simultaneously protect and degrade is shown to reside in manipulation of chemical time via hydrogen bonding and electron exchange, thereby reframing freezing as a highly active and transformational process. Countering long-held assumptions about cryopreservation as an operation of stasis after which the thawed entity is the same as it was before, this article details recent demonstrations of effects of cryoprotectant exposure that are nonlethal but nonetheless profoundly impactful within scientific and therapeutic practices that depend on freezing infrastructures. Understanding the operationalization of chemical time in the case of cryoprotectants is broadly relevant to other modern technologies dedicated to shifting how material things exist and persist in human historical time.

In Denmark, as in many other countries, declining fertility rates have stimulated debates about ‘underpopulation’ as a threat to the nation’s future sustainability. At the same time, climate change has initiated debates about ‘overpopulation’ and ‘overconsumption’ as a problem for sustaining the planet. While both debates can be understood in terms of demographic anxieties placing sustainable reproductive futures’ central, they exhibit different ideas of what ‘sustainable’ entails. In this article, we analyze how sustainable reproduction is negotiated within agendas of respectively a national fertility crisis and the climate crisis. We do so by mapping the media debates in Denmark in the period between 2010 and 2022. The aim of the article is to contribute to an understanding of the repro-paradox which simultaneously calls upon young Danes to reproduce more and less.

The medical practice termed Personalized Medicine ideally uses all the patient’s possible characteristics in predicting disease predisposition and response to therapy, but primarily employs the individual’s unique molecular make-up in the tailoring of treatment. This change in medical practice also entails an epistemic shift towards ‘molecularization’: individuals and disease are now understood and governed through life’s basic building blocks. In this paper we argue that underlying personalized medicine is a continued understanding of the pathological state as a quantitative deviation from a normal state. In this we build on the critique of French philosopher Georges Canguilhem who positioned the quantitative interpretation of the pathological in nineteenth century medical thinking. Personalized cancer medicine takes each patient’s cancer as singular, implying that there is no ‘normal’ baseline for comparing individual pathology. We analyze cases of personalized cancer clinical trials from recent years to show that each displays a quantitative understanding of the pathological reminiscent of past thinking in two main modes: a molecularized interpretation of cancer pathology and a quantitative measuring of targeted therapy efficacy. We situate the analysis in broader discussions of historical medical shifts and in current studies of personalized medicine, to outline implications of this form of continuity.

Human tissues and cells are now recognized as an important source of health and wealth. As such, public authorities have assumed responsibility for regulating their procurement, storage and use. Looking at the interactions between law and life through the lens of ‘bioconstitutionalism’, we specifically ask how human bodily material (HBM) is regulated and explore the resulting changing relationships between citizens, public authorities and researchers in Belgium, a country where the pharmaceutical industry weighs heavily in terms of employment and economic growth. We examine the regulation of HBM and show how the Belgian bioconstitutional order increasingly promotes research by facilitating the availability and use of HBM in the hope that this will fuel the engine of innovation, employment, and economic growth. We argue that this represents a turnaround from traditional conceptions of biological citizenship, as the state’s demand that its citizens donate their HBM for research is reinforced. We emphasize that what it means to be “altruistic” is being reshaped within a new moral economy of donation, without a clear recognition of this reshaping: while citizens are crucial contributors to the development of the bioeconomy, they are excluded from participating in the governance of how this bioeconomy develops.

Recent decades have seen expansions in the subfield of pathogen genomic epidemiology, also called ‘molecular epidemiology.’ Practitioners in this area analyze pathogen genetic sequence data to identify the emergence of pathogen subtypes or ‘variants,’ including ones that have evolved to have problematic biological characteristics such as greater transmissibility or treatment resistance. The field’s prominence has led to public controversies surrounding applications of pathogen genomics in disease control. The most highly visible examples occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the designation of SARS-CoV-2 ‘Variants of Concern’ by the World Health Organization shaped public health strategies, media stories, and everyday talk about the pandemic. Drawing on several cases, I argue that controversies around uses of pathogen genomics have driven the emergence of a novel kind of socio-technical form, which I call a ‘molecular public.’ Molecular publics materialize when pathogen genomic science enters public discourse through news media or similar means, followed by people recognizing themselves as being potentially at risk of becoming infected with a particular pathogen subtype or affected by policy responses to a variant. I present molecular publics as a useful analytic for social studies of infectious disease and a vector through which novel biosocialities mediated by pathogens can emerge.