Three Subprojects

Building on the local findings, a more fine grained and comparative analysis was done in three sub-projects with different topical foci:

• Workpackage 5 was focussed on concepts of medicalisation and geneticisation,
  
• workpackage 6 dealt with public understandings of science, governance and participation,
  
• workpackage 7 was dedicated to bringing together bioethical reflections with public moral claims concerning the body, identity and religious beliefs.
  

The agenda for the subprojects was developed in defining publication projects for specific questions related to the workpackage. Defining publication projects instead of a common homogeneous output allowed different teams to approach the central research questions in different ways. This seemed important in order to give space to the different disciplinary traditions as well as methodological approaches.

Limiting and Expanding Comparison

Given the depth of the material and the time constraints, it was decided that comparative efforts within the work packages could not cover all project countries, but had to be restricted to certain constellations depending on the precise research question. The selections of countries to be compared followed well reflected methodical considerations. The selection data was coordinated between partners and workpackages, so that each data set became topic of analysis at least in one study.

Further, – though basically all papers are structured around a comparative approach – the objects of comparative interest were not limited to the initial focus on cross-national differences and commonalities: Firstly, technology was added as an axis for comparison, as people’s approach to the two technologies investigated – organ transplantation and post-natal genetic testing – had high impact both on their moral-ethical reflections as well as on their visions of and trust in the technology and its governance. Further, also the self conceptualisation of people’s affectedness and of their body turned out to be extremely context sensitive with regard to the respective biomedical embedding. And finally, also an in depth reflection of the very different analytic approaches in this project – ranging from anthropology, over science studies to bioethics – proved of comparative interest.