Nik Brown is Deputy Director of the Science and Technology Studies Unit (SATSU) and a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of York. His current research interests focus on culturally intriguing developments in the biosciences like cloning, transpecies transplantation, hybrids, chimeras, stem cells, and biobanking. He is interested in the social management of the boundaries between life and death, the human and the animal, the biologically mundane and the exotic, the public and the private. He is particularly interested in the politics, regulation and governance of novel biological developments and reproduction. He has also written extensively on the sociology of hope, expectations and futurity.

Until more recently, internationally operating pharmaceutical companies conducted most of their development of new medicines in Western countries, in Japan and Australia. These areas still represent the most attractive markets, and also have the strongest experience in planning and executing complex projects like early and late phase clinical trials. While the economic and societal situation in emerging economies like Brazil, China, India is changing at rapid pace there is growing interest by local academic researchers and by international drug companies in expanding drug development activities to these countries. While researchers want to become recognized as part of the international scientific community, the pharma companies want to benefit from a large, treatment naïve patient pool. They are also attracted by the prospect of a rapidly growing market and attractive labor cost.

The potential benefits are obvious. However, the expansion of drug development and clinical research to economically still developing and politically often unstable countries gives also rise to ethical concerns: Participants in such trials may be less protected than in the traditional countries and pharmaceutical companies may exploit the weaknesses of the regulatory and societal system.

The presentation will therefore address three specific areas of concern:

• Governance and Compliance in Clinical Research in emerging economies (Example: China)

• How does compliance with Ethical standards influence quality of research?

• Developing medicines for diseases of poor countries: When the Market fails to drive innovation

Detlef.Niese is head of External Affairs in Global Development at Novartis Pharma A.G: responsible for public, governmental, societal and ethical issues concerning drug development.

He is a licensed pharmacist (1971) and physician (1977) with board certification in internal medicine (1988) and specialisation in Rheumatology and Clinical Immunology.

He received a doctoral degree in immunogenetics from the faculty of Medicine in Bonn, Germany 1980. Since 1988 he held the positions as Head of the departments of Clinicial Immunology and Clinical Pathology responsible for the in- and outpatient care for patients with immunological diseases including autoimmune diseases and immunodeficiencies as HIV as well as for the Clinical Immunology and Clinical Pathology laboratories. Since 1990, Dr.Niese is a member of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Bonn.

Nowadays, the research aims and topics of the Life-Sciences have gained a new visibility, as these aims and topics are increasingly proliferating in ‘public’ spaces. Yet scholars and activists have pointed out that the medical model (based on the Life-Sciences) is but “one way of knowing” phenomena such as bodies, health and illness, indeed life itself. For the last half century or so, the social model has provided an alternative perspective. While the medical model considers “illness”, “deformity” or “disorder” as a personal misfortune requiring medical intervention (prevention, cure and/or treatment), the social model views illness and impairment as a public issue, acquiring meaning and requiring attention and accommodation in the public realm. Within the last decade, both of these models have been critiqued for their restrictively dualistic formulation by scholars and activists who argue for an alternative model more suited to our ‘somatic’ society. The workshop seeks to anatomize this tension and to articulate the emerging alternative model via several cultural productions.

Against the background of the keynote speech of Susan Squier, who investigates this tension within Disability Studies, we invite students from various disciplines to enlarge this discussion by presenting their projects that deal with this tension in cases of biomedical research, veterinary and agricultural biotechnologies, stem cell research, end-of-life issues or drug policies, etc..

In the context of worldwide demographic changes and a rapidly growing “greying” population, dementia emerged as an increasingly acute medical and socio-political problem during the last decades. Nowadays, dementia is recognised in public health domains as a political problem due to the considerable social, economic and financial impacts and costs that come along with it. Within this setting, new focal points concerning dementia research such as genomics research have a significant effect on health care strategies and policies in the respective field. Because dementia is not conceived as a normal part of the ageing process, great scientific efforts are made to develop and enhance diagnosis, cure, treatment and care to be able to cope with future demographic developments. With regard to the question of efficiency and efficacy, these endeavours entail a repercussion on the management of dementia. At the same time and as a result of different and changing understandings of dementia and the conditions that may cause it, new ways of governing dementia occurred during the last years. In trying to meet these socio-political challenges, the conference will address several important aspects of governing dementia in the genomic and global era.

In times of transnational collaboration of scientists and researchers, of genetic tests offered on the internet, and of “genetic tourism” having become a common phenomenon, the governance of genetics and genomics is no longer an exclusive realm of national regulation. It is impossible to govern society from a single centre or by means of a single privileged governance mechanism.

“This topic is related to our daily work, and it shades light on the deadly period of the second Palestinians uprising (2000-2004), where we, the DIFS [Division of Identification & Forensic Science], played a very crucial role.” [Dr.Zadok]

At the March, 2000 news conference at the White House, President Clinton and Prime Minister Blair jointly hosted and celebrated the completion of the "first draft" of the full map and sequence of the human genome. Francis Collins and Craig Venter, fierce competitors in the race to complete the map, stepped forward to agree on one thing -- that the Human Genome Project provided definitive evidence that racial categories have no meaning at the level of the DNA. The oft-quoted figure of "we are all 99.9 per cent alike" (in our DNA) became a mantra for the next few years. However, at the same time, there was a "turn to difference" in the new fields of pharmacogenomics and pharmacotoxicology, aided by supercomputers and the capacity to do profiles of the more than
3 million points of difference (DNA markers) between any two individuals. It would soon follow that the technology would be used to find patterned markers of differences between groups of individuals, socially marked. This generated a huge debate, culminating in the approval by the FDA in June, 2005 of the first race-based drug, BiDil, about the role of race in clinical medicine. In addition, the whole arena of "ancestral informative markers" has burgeoned, both as "recreational" knowledge about ancestral origins, but as well in forensics, as a means of predicting the race of a crime suspect based upon tissue samples left at a crime scene. These converging developments are ushering in a new era of the reinscription of race as a category in biology, clinical medicine, and forensics, and the implications for social science and public policy are profound. This lecture will examine some of the social and political implications of these developments.

In recent years, considerable resistance to genetically modified food and crops has emerged globally. This has witnessed the mandatory labelling of GM foods in over thirty countries, and moratoriums on GM crops in the European Union and Australia especially. In examining this situation in Australia, I advance and apply a new category of theoretical/analytical inquiry called 'green biopolitics', which reflects the intersection of two main understandings of 'biopolitics': the new public policy area of biotechnology policy and the historical tradition of Foucauldian inquiry. My presentation approaches the topic through two interrelated parts involving theory to practice, where the latter focuses on the biopolitical struggle about GMOs and their environmental release in Australia. The analysis reveals key political technologies to normalize expert regulation and order civic concerns in the interests of creating an Australian bioeconomy, but which has yielded increasing civic tensions due to deepening cracks in the foundational discourses and practices of genetic engineering

The International Conference "The New Governance of Life: Challenges, Transformations, Innovations" concludes our three year EU sponsored research project about life science governance. In the PAGANINI (Participatory Governance and Institutional Innovation) project, we have looked at a number of different topics ranging from stem cell research and genetic testing over nuclear power dilemmas and nature conservatism to genetically modified food and food policy to identify how these areas are governed, and will be governed in the future and what role there is for participatory practices in all of this. Many things have gone wrong in these fields of governance, and we were asking: why? What are the lessons from these experiences for future governance?

How "regional" is life science governance today? Or are we moving towards a more global style of life science governance? Which countries seem to be better "equipped" for life science governance than others? And why? What is the role of the European Union in life science governance?

In asking these questions, the conference brings together academics working in these fields, policy makers, scientists, and representatives of the mass media in a hopefully fruitful dialogue and conversation.

In this seminar I develop the notion of Bourdiusian Geographies as a framework to examine the social, scientific and medical dimensions of human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research. I begin with an outline of David Livingstone’s approach to ‘geographies of science’, and I emphasise the spatial shaping of science and the scientific shaping of space. I then argue that the conceptual schema of Pierre Bourdieu - and in particular his notions of field, habitus, capital, and illusio - is a novel, fruitful and synergistic approach to science studies and to understanding ‘the evolution of a revolution’ in the emerging field of hESC research. I draw upon my ongoing research on the problems and prospects of stem cell science, and especially the interactions between the lab and the clinic in the field of Type-1 diabetes. I explore the views of scientists in some of the leading stem cell and beta cell labs in the UK and the USA and I contend that initial expectations of a translational research revolution in regenerative medicine have been dampened by the difficulties of making insulin producing pancreatic beta cells from embryonic stem cells. I explore the influence of seminal papers on laboratory and clinical practices, and I describe the subsequent transformation of the spaces of science at several spatial scales. I also investigate the laboratory production of scientific knowledge, and in particular how scientists’ choose which research to pursue in scientific-landscapes-in-the-making. In conclusion, I argue that a Bourdieusian Geographies perspective offers a productive approach to both science studies and to understanding the shaping of contested biomedical landscapes.

  During the last years, a number of prominent cases of scientific misconduct and fraud have caused great public attention. In the wake of major fraud incidents such as the case of the South Korean stem cell researcher Hwang Woo-suk, more general questions have been raised about the limits of the peer-review system, innovation-competition between the major science journals, the increasing „publish-or-perish pressure“ on scientists, and the impact of internet generated knowledge on scientific integrity.

  The impression that research inegrity, fraud, and misconduct are becoming major problems in contemtorrary science governance has also triggered high-level policy responses and initiatives. On September 16-19, 2007, for example, the Portuguese European Union Presidency together with the European Commission, the European Science Foundation & the US Office of Research Integrity organize a major world conference on research integrity in Lisboa.

  At the same time, the phenomena of scientific misconduct, research integrity, and scientific fraud are a surprisingly under-researched topics. With a few exceptions, the famous scientific fraud cases have not stimulated scholars in the humanities and social sciences to study closely incidences of scientific fraud and misconduct. Much of the literature on peer-review seems to be more driven by negative personal experiences by its authors than detached scientific interest in the matter.

  At the same time, the phenomena of scientific misconduct, research integrity, and scientific fraud are a surprisingly under-researched topics. With a few exceptions, the famous scientific fraud cases have not stimulated scholars in the humanities and social sciences to study closely incidences of scientific fraud and misconduct. Much of the literature on peer-review seems to be more driven by negative personal experiences by its authors than detached scientific interest in the matter.

Today, "everyone knows" that the 1989 claims of a new type of "cold fusion" cannot be correct, just as various perpetual motion machines and other claims cannot be correct. At the time of any specific claim, however, no one knows whether that claim is correct. A science studies approach to this problem insists on "symmetry," on understanding how the scientific community comes to communal judgment about which claims to believe without pre-knowledge of what the "correct" answer is. In hindsight, it seems likely that some fraud was associated with some cold fusion claims. Yet it is also true that today, nearly 20 years later, some researchers with reasonable claims to membership in the mainstream scientific community continue to claim positive results for cold fusion experiments -- indeed, in early 2007, one such researcher was explicitly cleared of charges of scientific misconduct. So, how should science studies approach questions of fraud -- as normative statements about proper scientific work, or as contextual explorations of the conditions under which charges of fraud appear? Using the (still!) ongoing cold fusion saga, this paper will argue that fraud is particularly relevant when examining cases in which simultaneously "everyone knows" and "no one knows."

After having finished his PhD at the University of Konstanz a young researcher in the field of material sciences does what everybody would do for his/her career: he leaves for a post-doc in a renowned US research lab, Lucent Technologies. Here begins a scientific career which seems like a fairy-tale. In the period between 1988 and 2001 the young man manages to “discover” or to finally “realise” a whole series of phenomena which the whole community of material researchers, but also science policy makers and media had been expecting eagerly. Summarized under the buzz word nanotechnologies, they seem to open promising doors for new industrial applications which could revolutionize whole areas.

His colleagues feel that they can’t follow such an outburst of productivity; journals hype the field, media speak of a genius or wizard. He manages to publish with about 20 renowned co-authors in the top science journals such as Science and Nature: over 90 publications in not even 3 years. His papers go into the review system and pass the test. But nobody manages to reproduce his experiments. In 2001 he is awarded with the Otto-Klung-Weberbank Preis, which is meant to honour outstanding young researchers in the field of physics and chemistry. The Max Planck Institute for Material Sciences in Stuttgart is negotiating with him over the position of director.

Suddenly the story comes to an end. Having used one and the same curve in different publications (Science and Nature) - however with different scaling - raises first doubts. A commission is put in place by his lab: the young researcher cannot present any data, none of his co-authors has ever seen any data nor experiments. The conclusion of the commission is clear: they are confronted with one of the largest cases of fraud and this time in a field – material sciences - which felt protected so far.

The talk will analyse the more systemic perspectives of this case and focus on the current technoscientific knowledge production as it become visible through this case. It will investigate the role technoscientific promises play in this context and how they constitute a quasi parallel economy in which scientific results are negotiated and get value attributed. This comprises issues of the intertwinedness of science, media and policy, the politics of excellence, the functioning of peer review systems and many more.

The paper will analyse the scientific fraud case of Hwang Woo-suk and his group at Seoul National University in South Korea. The fraud was not the work of one man or one laboratory, but involved a considerable number of collaborators at different universities and medical establishments. Furthermore, from the late 1990s on, Hwang had build a growing network of supporters and collaborators, composed of key policy-makers, politicians including the president of South Korea, industrialists, journalists and leading scholars in stem cell and cloning research from a variety of countries. We will discuss the rise of the Hwang-system against the context of biotechnology governance in South Korea, and explain its operation and politics of persuasion. The research is based on interviews with key actors from Korea (including Hwang Woo-suk and the “whistle blower”) conducted between November 2005 and February 2006.

The story of Mendel’s research is regarded as one of the highlights in the history of the life sciences. It has become a scientific legend. Yet, Mendel’s 1866 paper has raised (and will no doubt continue to raise) a host of questions of various kinds, not in the least about the methodological details of his work. Mendel himself published very little about his findings and his notebooks were posthumously destroyed. In a famous article the statistician Fischer (1936) tried to reconstruct the experiments and came to the conclusion that Mendel cannot possibly have performed them as they were reported. His published data on inheritance in pea plants were too good to be true. DiTrocchi (1991) even concluded that most of the experiments described in the paper are fictitious in the sense that they were performed on paper, in retrospect as it were, by disaggregating the data from various trials. Mendel’s case of “data massage” is duly discussed in various treatises on fraud in science (Cf. The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science, Judson 2004). How are we to assess his case? An important element is no doubt that Mendel represents the genesis of a new science, whose methodologies (for conducting and reporting trials) were still in statu nascendi.

Over the last decades, developments in the life sciences and bio-medicine have profoundly challenged our traditional understanding of what ‘life’ means. In particular, the margins of life, its beginning and its end, have been transformed from naturally given boundaries to hybrid zones of negotiation. The contested identity of the embodiment of this life at the margins, the early human embryo and the comatose patient, vividly demonstrate that ‘life at the margins’ has moved into the center of political debates.

National and regional differences in public discussions and regulations of cloning, embryo research, transplantation, or the end of life, show that these negotiations are heavily influenced by social, cultural, religious and political factors. Both the technological/material feasibility and related societal expectations provide the context for the new government of life.

Today, we are faced with a set of novel political questions: who is allowed to speak truth on the margins of life topics? Why do some construct an embryo as ‘a living person’, others as a ‘clump of cells’? What are the arguments to put an end to the life of a person in coma? How are such decisions made and by whom? How should they be made and by whom? While such questions have been broadly discussed in philosophy or in the STS field, the workshop will systematically focus on the implications of these new questions for our understanding of what constitutes government of life today. We are especially interested in discussing comparatively the relationship between the various sites where the margins of life are negotiated, and the implications of these cross-site negotiations for emerging modes in the government of life.

Studies have shown that many Israeli women and the Israeli legal, religious and medical systems are exceptionally supportive of genetic testing prior to or during pregnancy, as well as of its potential outcomes (selective abortions to prevent the birth of children with disability). While reproductive genetics and selective abortions have been intensely criticized throughout the western world, criticism has been more or less absent from Israeli-Jewish society. Indeed, Israeli women often face pressure to engage in the selection of their embryos, or, in the so-called “ultra”-Orthodox community, to marry according to "genetic compatibility". In this lecture I will ask why this is so, or why criticism of such practices is virtually absent in Israel. In order to answer this question I will draw on culturally-specific Israeli-Jewish understandings of different issues, such as: the bio-cultural concept of "life" and of a "life worthy of living" versus "wrongful life"; the moral standing of the fetus and its relationship with its mother; and Jewish-Zionist attitudes towards science, medicine, and “eugenics”.

Reflections offered in this lecture draw upon the manuscript of Yael Hashiloni-Dolev's forthcoming book on this topic (published by Springer/Kluwer, 2007).

This quotation unveils the complex nature of genetic testing and screening as a technology that traverses different social fields and subjects, in so far as it sheds light on the intricate relationships between the idea that we can be classified as ill o at risk even when we are perfectly well, that we can perceive ourselves as being well even when we are ill (according to a new taxonomy that reinvents the register of illness and wellbeing), and finally between public registers and personal politics. For the purpose of this discussion, I will argue here that genetic testing and screening touches four fundamental fields, namely: (1) Genetic enhancement, (2) Genetic commerce and law, (3) Genetic policies and privacy and (4) Genetic Knowledge and ethics. These four fields are activated by practices related to four bio-domains: manipulation, diagnosis, control, and selfcare/self-knowledge. For the purpose of this paper, I will first briefly describe how the technology of genetic testing and screening emanates from those practices, and second position them in a discursive formation that involves science, politics and the individual. How is genetic testing and screening positioned and embedded in the biopolitical ‘discourses’ of our time? Interestingly, genetic testing and screening is one of those technologies which enjoys general consensus, because of the promises attached to it, and because of the opportunities that it gives to individuals to know more about themselves. It is therefore position between the governing minds of biopolitics and a politics of the self that might strengthen ethical agents and question a certain biopolitical rationality currently driven by science and great expectations.

Interpretative policy analysis is now a well-established perspective in policy studies. Many efforts are now underway to consolidate this perspective, both theoretically and institutionally within departments, journals and research groups. I add to this work by considering this reconstructive task in terms of contemporary theoretical perspectives on policy analysis and the place of policy analysis in academia. To ground the advances made thus far and to move contemporary interpretative theory beyond traditional perspectives, we must consider these tasks together. That is, together with rhetorical theory, I propose that sociological reflexivity upon our own location within the social sciences is also necessary to ground interpretative policy analysis. I will make some initial discussions towards establishing the grounds for these twin tasks by exploring two main themes of contemporary interpretative policy theory; rhetoric and practice. Rhetoric has much to offer beyond what deliberative policy analysis has offered until now. I consider some of the limitations of the ‘deliberative’ perspective in terms of its treatment of rhetoric and argumentation and also consider how sociological reflexivity contributes to the understanding of these limitations. I also relate these themes to the question of policy practice, contrasted with the idea of intentional action, and consider this question within the larger question of structure and agency, a fundamental concern of all the social sciences. I draw on the ideas of Herbert Gottweis on rhetorical policy analysis, the philosopher Michel Meyer, and the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.

This interdisciplinary conference focuses on the governance of biobanks. Biobanks constitute a new challenge for governance, and can themselves be understood as new forms of governing bodies and populations. Biobanks are an important element in the new biopolitical order in which self-guidance through active citizens is as significant as state-led strategies of population politics, body monitoring, the rise of the new bio-economy, and the redefinition of citizenship. Biobanks, thus, cannot be disconnected from considerations of power, resistance, ethics, politics, and the reshaping of current practices in biomedical governance. The various presentations at the conference will address these topics based on empirical case studies. Our main objective will be to identify emerging patterns of biobank governance, and their implications for science, society, politics, and culture.

An important feature of the conference is its strong comparative dimension. We will discuss biobank cases from Japan, Estonia, Iceland, the UK, France, Germany, the US, Australia, Austria, and Israel and also look at transnationally organized biobanks projects, such as the p3g consortium. Speakers will include researchers who are actively engaged in the organization and administration of biobank projects in order to stimulate a vivid exchange between social and political theory, ethical reflection, empirical analysis, and the practice of biobank organization and operation.