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| “Bio-subjects,
bio-objects and bio-agents: tracking socio-material realities” |
| Andrew
Webster, Department of Sociology, University of York |
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| This
paper explores the meaning of three types of bio-form – that
relating to bio-subjects as unique and bounded identities, bio-objects
whose identity is characterised via hybridity and manipulation,
and bio-agents that act as informational flows and frameworks that
have an independence from yet act upon bio-subjects and bio-objects.
It is the articulation of the three that is closely involved in
the process of ‘bio-objectification’, a concept that
is central to the COST network. The paper goes on to explore how
bio-objects are made mobile illustrated within the field of regenerative
medicine, and concludes by offering some broader implications relating
to both methodology and policy. |
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| “Sex,
cash and the neuro-objectification of desire” |
| Isabelle
Dussauge, Department of Thematic Studies, Technology and Social
Change, Linköping University |
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| This
paper takes its starting point in contemporary functional neuroimaging
studies of sexuality. In order to design and interpret their experiments,
neuroscientists of sexuality draw on a broad range of neuroscientific
literature that goes beyond the question of sex per se. Among others,
an important number of these studies refer to neuroeconomics (e.g.,
neuroimaging experiments of expectation of monetary gains) and the
neurobiology of addiction. In common for these studies of sex, money
and drugs is the attempt to conceptualize desire in terms of brain
processes. This talk addresses how the ‘desiring brain’
emerges across the boundaries of the neurobiology of addiction,
neuroeconomics, evolutionary psychology, and new neurosciences of
sexuality. I argue that when becoming neural, desire is not only
reified but re-animated as the effect of a brain machinery of valuation
of rewards. The neuro-objectification of desire therefore goes beyond
the reduction of desire as a non-social thing. Through neuro-objectification,
desire is re-imbued with a vitality of its own, which privileges
goal-directedness and inflicts upon human life a new direction:
the neural pursuit of happiness. |
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| “Somatic
cell nuclear transfer: may a biotechnology change our moral and
legal paradigms?” |
| Iñigo
de Miguel Beriain, Inter-University Chair in Law and the Human
Genome, Universidad de Deusto |
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| It
is usually the consensus that a new biotechnology may raise ethical
questions that should be considered based on ethical and legal paradigms.
However, it is not common to believe that sometimes it may be precisely
those paradigms (and the presuppositions they are built on) what
should be revisited after its advent. The aim of this paper is to
show how the appearance of the somatic cell nuclear transfer may
cause a Copernican turn in some of our current ethical paradigms
as well as induce a radical change in the way concepts such as embryo
or human being are defined in our legal systems. |
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| “The
objects of biopolitics: materials and markets, states and stakeholders
in Europe and the rising economies” |
| Alex
Faulkner, Centre for Biomedicine & Society, King’s
College London |
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| Do
bio-objects have politics? The development of biomedicine is transforming
the materials, institutions and practices of medicine globally.
Given the continuing salience of medicalisation processes, subjectivities
and structures of society are being re-shaped, and in turn are co-producing
these emerging sociomedical realities through more or less formal
political and strategic processes. These developments are important
to personal, family and professional identities, to scientific labour
and development of disciplinary knowledge, to commodification and
property, to future healthcare and national and regional economies.
This paper reflects on a range of recent research in order to raise
some key theoretical issues in understanding the dynamics of these
processes in relation to the European Union and emerging economies.
Consideration is given to issues of definition, classification,
and productisation of biomaterial technologies; to issues of standardisation
and the stabilisation of technological sectors or zones; to issues
of translation between scientific innovation, expectations and usership/markets;
to the relationships between specific sectors or zones and national
state or regional government, regulation and law; and the issues
of levels, scales, dimensions and places of governance, and their
public institutions and private networks. Drawing together concepts
from political science and sociology/Science & Technology Studies,
the paper raises these issues through an examination of empirical
research in the European context including the field of regenerative
medicine (tissue engineering and ‘Advanced Therapy Medicinal
Products’, highlighting classification, standardisation, and
commensuration in national and EU legal and regulatory realms) and
disease diagnostics (biomarkers and genetic risk prediction tests,
highlighting epistemic governance and the configuring of market/usership
in the social/cultural realm). The paper extends the discussion
to consider how these theoretical considerations might be engaged
to develop an understanding of the significance for state and European
policymaking in medical biotechnology of the emergence of rising
economies such as Brazil, China and India. |
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|
“Challenges in the governance of bio-objects, and of governance
through bio-objectification: exploring synthetic biology and biobanks
in Europe” |
| Conor
Douglas, Section Community Genetics, Vrije University of Amsterdam
Medical Center & Technology Assessment Group, Rathenau Institute
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| At
face-value biobanking and synthetic biology (SynBio) may seem to
have little in common. Through the development and deployment of
the concepts of ‘bio-objects’ and ‘bio-objectification’
I will show that they might have more in common that one might expect
in terms of why they present particular challenges for governance,
and how both can be seen as tools for the governance of life in-and-of
themselves. Not only are there seemingly large differences between
biobanking and SynBio, but both also exhibit significant internal
diversity in terms of form, content, and practice. My comments
will therefore focus on a specific instantiation of biobanking
(i.e. the formalization, institutionalization, and prolonged storage
and extended use of heel prick cards -or what is elsewhere known
as dried newborn blood spots or Guthrie Cards- in the Netherlands),
and SynBio (i.e. health applications that are the product of,
or are derived from, living organism not found in nature, which
have been assembled through standardized molecular parts).
Before a description of how these bio-objects can be seen to
govern life can be provided, and even before the challenges of
governing bio-objects can be address, attention must first be
paid to the social, political, and economic processes that are
at work that make bio-banks and SynBio into ‘life’
objects - and hence the subject of governance. In other words,
how does the bio-objectification of SynBio and (heel prick card)
biobanks work?
With that in place we can move to explore the characteristics
of bio-objects that both biobanks and SynBio health products exhibit,
and discuss some of the challenges that such bio-objects produce
from a governance perspective. In the final part of this presentation
we will turn the tables to explore how these particular bio-objects
can be seen as tools through which governance can take place (Gottweis
2008).
|
|
| “Genetic
Discrimination 2.0. The un/differentiating gene in insurance” |
| Ine
van Hoyweghen, Department of Health, Ethics and Society, Maastricht
University |
|
| Life
insurance furnishes as an interesting intersection for studying
the interplay between bio-objects and the social, by exploring the
new identities and biosocial relations involved in the manufacture
of biosciences, law and insurance classifications. In this paper,
I will trace how the bio-object of genes has been integrated in
European insurance markets and how, at the same time, genes perform
European insurance markets in new and unforeseen ways. I will indicate
how genes may be capable of dividing as well as linking people together
in new ways in insurance, by proliferating and flattening difference.
In exploring this game of un/differentiation, the aim of the paper
is to articulate the transformative character of bio-objects. In
my analysis, I distinguish two different moments in the process
of ‘taming’ genes in the zone of European insurance.
The first stage will look at the introduction of genes in insurance
and the specific way this form of life has been made governable
through the development of Genetic Non-Discrimination Acts (GNDAs)
in European countries. In this paradigm of ‘Genetic Discrimination’,
solidarity is crafted towards the group of ‘the genetic at
risk’ in insurance. Subsequently, the second stage examines
how the new regime of GNDAs-in-insurance is working in practice
and explores its real-life consequences. It indicates some important
intricacies of GNDAs in coming to terms with the ‘wild life’
of genes and it suggests how genes may re-configure solidarity in
European insurance in new and unforeseen ways. By indicating how
genes may be a catalyst in re-organizing European insurance markets,
I demonstrate the need for further research on the relationship
between bio-objects, economic markets and the proliferation of the
social. We should not be naïve about the possibilities of classic
social technologies to deal with the biosciences, but we should
have an open eye for the multiple, diffracted character of bio-objects
and the social. The proliferation of bio-objects is likely to go
together with a proliferation of the social. |
|
| “Laboring
life: Bio-objects and their biosocial relations” |
| Gísli
Pálsson, Department of Anthropology, University of Iceland |
|
| Life
itself has become one of the most active zones of politics and economic
production. Not only do all kinds of agents labor on life, life
itself does all kinds of labor. This paper extends the notion of
relations of production beyond “natural” resources in
the classical sense to the extraction, reproduction, and exchange
of bio-objects, to biosocial relations of production. Addressing
the realities of life itself in late-modern times in terms of labor
processes and relations of production, it is argued, helps to characterize
the different arrangements involved in the production and circulation
of bio-objects and biosocial value. |
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Last updated
05/10/2011 |
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