BiosocietiesPub Date : 2024-03-22DOI: 10.1057/s41292-023-00321-y
Sara Lafuente-Funes
{"title":"“Being useful, I think it's the result of a sick society”: Critical reflections on reproductive politics and markets by women freezing their eggs in Spain","authors":"Sara Lafuente-Funes","doi":"10.1057/s41292-023-00321-y","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1057/s41292-023-00321-y","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This piece analyzes the way in which women that froze, are considering freezing or are freezing their eggs in Spain think critically about broader reproductive politics in Spain and about assisted reproduction. Drawing partially on previous studies around egg freezing, Thomas Lemke has suggested that cryopreservation practices represent a “politics of suspension” characterized by both reversibility and disposition, and concomitant with broader political inaction (Lemke in Sci Technol Hum Values 48(4):1–27, 2021). Drawing on feminist literature, and on how some of these women think about motherhood, it is relevant to emphasize this ‘suspension of politics’ that takes place along with a “politics of suspension,” meaning that certain matters (such as reproduction and its postponement) are only to be dealt with privately and individually, through marketized fertility preservation programs in this case. Some of the women interviewed describe these programs as useful tools within a problematic context: technologies that give time in a context that leaves them on their own to figure out motherhood (or its absence) in the midst of uncertainty and loneliness. This paper shows their critical views on these matters, while reflecting on how their experiences and desires become increasingly imbricated with the fertility industry in the making of their reproductive biographies (Perler and Schurr in Body Soc 27(3): 3–27, 2021).</p>","PeriodicalId":46976,"journal":{"name":"Biosocieties","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140202535","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
BiosocietiesPub Date : 2024-03-16DOI: 10.1057/s41292-023-00323-w
Bernice Azzopardi Meli, Anthony G. Fenech, Maria Cordina, Bridget Ellul, Emmanuel Agius
{"title":"Challenges in public policy for the implementation of pharmacogenetic tests in Europe","authors":"Bernice Azzopardi Meli, Anthony G. Fenech, Maria Cordina, Bridget Ellul, Emmanuel Agius","doi":"10.1057/s41292-023-00323-w","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1057/s41292-023-00323-w","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Pharmacogenetics innovation in biomedicine has fostered new hope in pharmacotherapeutics and in the prevention and management of adverse drug reactions. Proponents argue that pharmacogenetics will improve drug safety and efficacy while also revolutionising marketing. Integral to this survey is the recognition that pharmacogenetics has been hailed as a revolutionary frontier within biomedicine. This expectation amplifies the anticipation and promise associated with the emergence of new biotechnologies. This progress, however, raises several policy concerns with the need to balance the creation of a unified legal framework. We outline the European regulatory framework, and discuss the current challenges and opportunities related to licensing, the development of innovative medicines, cost-effectiveness, resource allocation, and stratification. There is the need to substantiate the value of a regulatory framework and vigilant monitoring to ensure equitable access and just distribution of the benefits of pharmacogenetics in Europe.</p>","PeriodicalId":46976,"journal":{"name":"Biosocieties","volume":"99 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140156157","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
BiosocietiesPub Date : 2024-03-16DOI: 10.1057/s41292-023-00319-6
{"title":"Guardians of ableist family formation: the legitimation work of Danish abortion committees in cases of termination for fetal anomaly","authors":"","doi":"10.1057/s41292-023-00319-6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1057/s41292-023-00319-6","url":null,"abstract":"<h3>Abstract</h3> <p>In Denmark, pregnant persons have a statutory right to abortion on-demand in the first trimester of pregnancy, after which abortion must be sanctioned by a regional abortion committee and may be warranted if there is danger that the fetus will suffer a serious mental or physical disability, yet what precisely constitutes ‘danger’ and ‘seriousness’ are left in the hands of the juridical abortion system to interpret. In this article, I explore how jurists and doctors arrive at and legitimate the authorization of disability-selective abortion. Building on van Wichelen’s (Legitimating life: adoption in the age of globalization and biotechnology, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, 2019) concept of ‘legitimation work,’ I show how abortion committees make legal decisions by dividing and distributing the task of —and moral responsibility for—making life-ending decisions by leaning on established legal practice, what I refer to as <em>bureaucratic legitimation work</em>; risk estimates made by external medical experts, what I refer to as <em>collaborative legitimation work</em>; and the ethical panacea of individual autonomy and informed choice, what I refer to as <em>ethopolitical legitimation work</em>. I argue that in conjunction, these forms of legitimation work turn termination of almost every non-conforming fetus into legitimate acts, hereby safeguarding ableist family formation. </p>","PeriodicalId":46976,"journal":{"name":"Biosocieties","volume":"83 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140156135","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
BiosocietiesPub Date : 2024-03-16DOI: 10.1057/s41292-023-00322-x
{"title":"Accept no limits: biocontainment and the construction of a safer space for experimentation in xenobiology as a legacy of Asilomar","authors":"","doi":"10.1057/s41292-023-00322-x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1057/s41292-023-00322-x","url":null,"abstract":"<h3>Abstract</h3> <p>Researchers in xenobiology, a subdiscipline of synthetic biology, aim to build a ‘second nature’ with nucleic acid analogues, termed Xeno-nucleic acids (XNA). They promise biosafe technologies, based on the impossibility of transferring genetic material to other organisms and controlling the proliferation of genetically modified microorganisms. Proponents of xenobiology have employed metaphors and narratives that represent the separation of synthetic life from DNA-based, constituting a safer space for the exploration and navigation of virtual biological worlds. Based on interviews with synthetic biologists and participant observation in a synthetic biology laboratory, I argue that the reconfiguration of nature that xenobiologists seek is inspired by the vision of design and governance laid out in the 1975 Asilomar conference, so normative aims of safety are co-produced with visions of unnaturalness. I interrogate the types of limits that xenobiologists aim to cross, to propose that they conceive limits as pushing beyond what is biologically plausible, finding the challenge motivating. I show that the division between the natural and the unnatural is not clearly established as xenobiologists portray. In giving priority to safety as the determinant of the permissibility of new technologies, who gets to define nature and its limits remains restricted to scientists.</p>","PeriodicalId":46976,"journal":{"name":"Biosocieties","volume":"41 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140156136","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
BiosocietiesPub Date : 2024-01-28DOI: 10.1057/s41292-023-00317-8
{"title":"Hormonal stories: a new materialist exploration of hormonal emplotment in four case studies","authors":"","doi":"10.1057/s41292-023-00317-8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1057/s41292-023-00317-8","url":null,"abstract":"<h3>Abstract</h3> <p>Hormones are complex biosocial objects that provoke myriad cultural narratives through their association with social activities and identities, and these narratives have the power to shape people’s lived realities and bodies. While hormones were historically conceptualised as ‘master molecules’ capable of controlling various life processes, their explanatory potential has now been overshadowed by technoscientific developments like omics- and gene-based biotechnologies that have reframed how human bodies and behaviours are understood. Considering these shifts, this paper asks what roles hormones perform and what stories they are arousing today. Through a patchwork of four hormone stories about contraception, gender hacking, birth, and autism-specific horse therapy, we show how hormones remain vital protagonists in the constitution of bodies, affects, environments, places, politics, and selves in the contemporary period. Building on new materialist approaches, we adopt and extend the notion of ‘emplotment’ to encapsulate how hormones act as key characters in our plots. They are working to complicate dominant understandings of what bodies are and can be in new ways as they mediate different plots of bodily experience, in ways showing the ongoing powerful salience of hormones and their ascendancy in the present.</p>","PeriodicalId":46976,"journal":{"name":"Biosocieties","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139580339","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
BiosocietiesPub Date : 2024-01-04DOI: 10.1057/s41292-023-00316-9
Vlas Nikulkin, Olga Zvonareva
{"title":"Formatting patient knowledge and channelling participation: how patient organisations work under authoritarianism","authors":"Vlas Nikulkin, Olga Zvonareva","doi":"10.1057/s41292-023-00316-9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1057/s41292-023-00316-9","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Patient experiential knowledge is important for the quality and responsiveness of healthcare systems. However, it is not rare for patients to struggle to have their knowledge recognised as credible and valuable. This study explores how patient organisations work to adjust patient knowledge to formats recognisable and acceptable by healthcare governance decision-makers. Using the case of patient organisations in Russia, we show that such formatting involves changes in language, practices, and materiality that contribute to channelling patient participation into specific routes and forms while marginalising others. Channelling of patient participation, then, rather than being a result of direct coercion, emerges as a distributed process continuously co-produced by a multitude of actors, such as state administration, patient organisations themselves, patient surveys, consultative spaces, and normative acts.</p>","PeriodicalId":46976,"journal":{"name":"Biosocieties","volume":"127 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-01-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139374379","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
BiosocietiesPub Date : 2023-11-22DOI: 10.1057/s41292-023-00315-w
Elaine W. Shen, Jessica M. Vandenberg, Amelia Moore
{"title":"Sensing inequity: technological solutionism, biodiversity conservation, and environmental DNA","authors":"Elaine W. Shen, Jessica M. Vandenberg, Amelia Moore","doi":"10.1057/s41292-023-00315-w","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1057/s41292-023-00315-w","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Environmental DNA (eDNA) has risen in popularity as a genetically-based method to enumerate species in natural ecosystems, and it is well positioned to be integrated into biodiversity monitoring and conservation initiatives. While the field has made great strides in methodological development, it has largely avoided discussion of its potential inequitable social outcomes. In this paper, we argue that the social asymmetries of eDNA are under-addressed precisely because of how it is framed and valued by powerful actors who may benefit from the technology’s proliferation. We use a framework of representational rhetorics to articulate the discursive process by which the biodiversity crisis is distilled into problems of data-deficiency and inefficiency in scientific articles such that eDNA offers the exact corresponding technological solution. This framing helps justify eDNA’s implementation in local, global, and corporate spheres, despite the methodology’s uncertainties and limitations. It may also enable future inequitable outcomes through sidelining other forms of biodiversity knowledge and enclosing biodiversity information through processes of genetic commodification and privatization. We engage with critiques of neoliberal conservation, big data, and (biodiversity) genomics made by political ecologists and feminist science and technology studies scholars to help reorient the eDNA field towards more equity-oriented discursive practices and implementations.</p>","PeriodicalId":46976,"journal":{"name":"Biosocieties","volume":"70 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2023-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138507960","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
BiosocietiesPub Date : 2023-10-12DOI: 10.1057/s41292-023-00314-x
Carrie Friese, Tarquin Holmes, Reuben Message
{"title":"Introduction to national cultures of animals, care and science","authors":"Carrie Friese, Tarquin Holmes, Reuben Message","doi":"10.1057/s41292-023-00314-x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1057/s41292-023-00314-x","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46976,"journal":{"name":"Biosocieties","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135968372","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
BiosocietiesPub Date : 2023-09-30DOI: 10.1057/s41292-023-00313-y
María Alejandra Petino Zappala, Lucía Ariza, Natacha Salomé Lima
{"title":"Conceptualization of genotype–phenotype relationships and the assessment of risk in advertising of direct-to-consumer and preimplantation polygenic tests","authors":"María Alejandra Petino Zappala, Lucía Ariza, Natacha Salomé Lima","doi":"10.1057/s41292-023-00313-y","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1057/s41292-023-00313-y","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46976,"journal":{"name":"Biosocieties","volume":"216 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136279967","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
BiosocietiesPub Date : 2023-09-26DOI: 10.1057/s41292-023-00312-z
Tarquin Holmes, Carrie Friese
{"title":"Figuring the ‘cynical scientist’ in British animal science: the politics of invisibility","authors":"Tarquin Holmes, Carrie Friese","doi":"10.1057/s41292-023-00312-z","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1057/s41292-023-00312-z","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper investigates the ‘cynical scientist’ as a figure in British animal science discourse that developed in relation to the nineteenth-century emergence of the ‘sceptical scientist’. Here, efforts by scientists to demarcate their profession’s territory led to religious backlash against an alleged ‘divorce’ of British science from Christian morality. Animal experimentation became embroiled in this controversy through antivivisectionists’ conviction that animal research was symptomatic of scientific scepticism and Continental atheism’s malign influence. Accusations of cynicism ultimately forced British scientists to accept legal regulation following the 1875 Royal Commission on Vivisection. British scientists were, however, able to utilise their political leverage and credibility as experts to favourably influence licensing and inspection. We suggest that efforts to silence public claims of scientific cynicism may have enabled ‘cynical scientists’ to remain invisible and that this was marked by privilege and power, not marginality. Nevertheless, we argue that regulation and reforms have also worked to internalise within British animal science the notion that scientific cynicism must be combatted through proper governance and internal discipline.","PeriodicalId":46976,"journal":{"name":"Biosocieties","volume":"60 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134887119","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}