BioSocieties

Erikainen, Sonja; Ford, Andrea; Malcolm, Roslyn; Raeder, Lisa

doi: 10.1057/s41292-023-00317-8pmid: 40060941

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.

Heinsen, Laura Louise

doi: 10.1057/s41292-023-00319-6pmid: N/A

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 bureaucratic legitimation work; risk estimates made by external medical experts, what I refer to as collaborative legitimation work; and the ethical panacea of individual autonomy and informed choice, what I refer to as ethopolitical legitimation work. 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.

Aparicio, Alberto

doi: 10.1057/s41292-023-00322-xpmid: N/A

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.

Kirksey, Eben; Su, Aaron

doi: 10.1057/s41292-024-00324-3pmid: N/A

The future is becoming inscrutable in Shenzhen, a city in southern China, despite efforts by biotechnologists to make life predictable and subject to control. Bubbles of speculation burst in 2018, as scandals disrupted local biotech ventures and as buildings were ripped apart by hostile atmospheric conditions. This article places the controversial CRISPR gene editing experiment conducted by Dr. He Jiankui, that resulted in the birth of the world’s first genetically modified children, in the context of Typhoon Mangkhut, the strongest storm to hit the region in nearly half a century. This superstorm destroyed architectural monuments to the exuberance of market capitalism, disrupted Dr. He’s plans at a critical moment in his entrepreneurial ventures, and surrounded dreams about creating synthetic life with accumulating rubble. Even as the elite envision spectacular futures in the storm’s aftermath—with architectural renderings, new biotech schemes, and state policies like the China Dream—we show that the future has become inscrutable for people working in marginalized economic sectors. A fish farmer, whose lifeworld was reduced to rubble by the typhoon, offers a clear vision of chaotic planetary futures from a perspective that is attuned to the heterogeneous temporalities of wild life.

Molldrem, Stephen

doi: 10.1057/s41292-024-00326-1pmid: N/A

Recent decades have seen expansions in the subfield of pathogen genomic epidemiology, also called ‘molecular epidemiology.’ Practitioners in this area analyze pathogen genetic sequence data to identify the emergence of pathogen subtypes or ‘variants,’ including ones that have evolved to have problematic biological characteristics such as greater transmissibility or treatment resistance. The field’s prominence has led to public controversies surrounding applications of pathogen genomics in disease control. The most highly visible examples occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the designation of SARS-CoV-2 ‘Variants of Concern’ by the World Health Organization shaped public health strategies, media stories, and everyday talk about the pandemic. Drawing on several cases, I argue that controversies around uses of pathogen genomics have driven the emergence of a novel kind of socio-technical form, which I call a ‘molecular public.’ Molecular publics materialize when pathogen genomic science enters public discourse through news media or similar means, followed by people recognizing themselves as being potentially at risk of becoming infected with a particular pathogen subtype or affected by policy responses to a variant. I present molecular publics as a useful analytic for social studies of infectious disease and a vector through which novel biosocialities mediated by pathogens can emerge.

Macq, Hadrien; Parotte, Céline; Delvenne, Pierre

doi: 10.1057/s41292-024-00327-0pmid: N/A

Human tissues and cells are now recognized as an important source of health and wealth. As such, public authorities have assumed responsibility for regulating their procurement, storage and use. Looking at the interactions between law and life through the lens of ‘bioconstitutionalism’, we specifically ask how human bodily material (HBM) is regulated and explore the resulting changing relationships between citizens, public authorities and researchers in Belgium, a country where the pharmaceutical industry weighs heavily in terms of employment and economic growth. We examine the regulation of HBM and show how the Belgian bioconstitutional order increasingly promotes research by facilitating the availability and use of HBM in the hope that this will fuel the engine of innovation, employment, and economic growth. We argue that this represents a turnaround from traditional conceptions of biological citizenship, as the state’s demand that its citizens donate their HBM for research is reinforced. We emphasize that what it means to be “altruistic” is being reshaped within a new moral economy of donation, without a clear recognition of this reshaping: while citizens are crucial contributors to the development of the bioeconomy, they are excluded from participating in the governance of how this bioeconomy develops.

Bach, Anna Sofie; Breengaard, Michala Hvidt

doi: 10.1057/s41292-024-00330-5pmid: N/A

In Denmark, as in many other countries, declining fertility rates have stimulated debates about ‘underpopulation’ as a threat to the nation’s future sustainability. At the same time, climate change has initiated debates about ‘overpopulation’ and ‘overconsumption’ as a problem for sustaining the planet. While both debates can be understood in terms of demographic anxieties placing sustainable reproductive futures’ central, they exhibit different ideas of what ‘sustainable’ entails. In this article, we analyze how sustainable reproduction is negotiated within agendas of respectively a national fertility crisis and the climate crisis. We do so by mapping the media debates in Denmark in the period between 2010 and 2022. The aim of the article is to contribute to an understanding of the repro-paradox which simultaneously calls upon young Danes to reproduce more and less.

Eriksson, Lise

doi: 10.1057/s41292-024-00333-2pmid: N/A

This article investigates 20 years of discursive struggles in Nordic medical journals around the process of legitimating and routinising gestational surrogacy and uterus transplantation in Finland and Sweden. The comparative analysis through critical discourse analysis suggests that influential health care professionals have contributed to different levels of legal and cultural adaptation of the methods, prioritising non-commercial gestational surrogacy in Finland and uterus transplantation in Sweden. The article identifies central discursive turning points in the medical journal discussions by interpreting them against the background of medical and policy developments in Finland and Sweden during the analysed twenty-year period. Legitimation and routinisation of surrogacy and uterus transplantation were developed through biomedicalisation by representing them as infertility treatments and emphasising the relational dynamics between donors and recipients—a connection that in the Nordic context is often based on kinship or close relationships. The diagnosis of absolute uterine factor infertility was central to representing women as on the boundary between fertile and infertile, as they may have functioning ovaries. Through the biomedicalised rhetoric of equal opportunities for biogenetic motherhood, the diagnosed women’s ambiguous reproductive status was used to legitimise the two methods as cures for absolute infertility, thereby reinforcing hegemonic family and kinship norms.