Biosocieties最新文献

This article explores recent debates on innovation in the drug sector, focusing on the ways in which the articulation of use value and exchange value operates in the hegemonic—Northern—form of pharmaceutical capitalism. Taking the category ‘crisis of innovation’ as an entry point and engaging with the economics literature in which it has been discussed for nearly twenty years, this paper uses the vast historiography of post-WWII pharmacy to propose a critical historical understanding of the crisis. It argues that the features to which the crisis discourses point originate in the long-term contradictions between use value and exchange that affect the dominant regime of pharmaceutical innovation, i.e., the screening regime of research and development. These tensions have accumulated over the past two decades and become more visible, leading to a new reading of the present turn toward bio-capital, i.e., toward biotechnology and a more speculative (financial) economy of pharmacy. The last section of the paper discusses the theoretical implications of this hypothesis.

Over the past two decades, there has been increasing demand for openness in policy and practice relating to donor-conceived families. With the benefits of openness now widely discussed, and often legally mandated, it is timely to explore the challenges families face in enacting openness when donor assisted conception is still a complex legal and social issue. Our premise is that the difficulties associated with enacting openness should be subject to at least as much scrutiny as the secrecy of past practices. To make our case, we draw on qualitative, socio-legal and sociological research with same-sex, sole parent and heterosexual donor-conceived families in the UK and Australia. We argue that exhortations to openness about donor conception ignore important relational considerations of families if they rely on a moral discourse that being open is the right thing to do, devoid of any context about how, when and by whom this is achieved. Demands for openness need to take into account the situated care relationships of family members, the timing of and manner in which information is imparted, and the fact that this information can fundamentally disrupt or transform the family lives of those to whom it is revealed.

While CRISPR/Cas9 has become a lightning rod for fears about humanity’s increasing capacity to engineer biological life, the mainstream of Anglo-American bioethics struggles to discern much wrong with genome editing of human beings in vitro. In this paper, we analyze the notion of biopolitics and consider what contribution it may make to debates on genome editing. We disambiguate the different senses of two key terms: ‘biopolitics’, and ‘life’, and try to show how particular authors in the biopolitics literature draw on and emphasize different versions of these concepts. In the final section of the paper, we venture some suggestions as to the contribution that a number of these approaches might make to moving beyond a focus on risk and individual liberty to address the urgent bioethical questions surrounding the use of CRISPR/Cas9 to edit the human genome.

Taking the early tissue culture experiments of Alexis Carrel in the 1910s–1930s as its example, the article explores the relationship between advances in biotechnological control over living matter and a holistic ontology of life, which stresses the temporal specificity of living things. With reference to Henri Bergson, Carrel argued that physiological time depends on an organism’s relationship to its milieu. By developing a laboratory apparatus and culture media, new objects of investigation could be made to live outside the organism and be brought to behave in novel temporal ways. In difference to recent biotechnological advances, like for example genome editing, which seek to ‘engineer’ living organisms by rebuilding them from their DNA up, then, early twentieth century interventionist laboratory practices were often linked to an understanding that biological plasticity results from organismic complexity and interactions between organism and milieu. These notions contributed to shaping laboratory apparatuses and techniques; they also helped to establish an understanding of environmental control that would allow for the production of novel ‘living things’.