As part of the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), David L. Huxsoll and Raymond A. Zilinskas convened a roundtable of biological weapons inspectors who have served in recent United Nations inspections in Iraq. The roundtable was presented over a three-hour period on May 22, 1995. To give the audience a “feel” for what inspectors do and the conditions under which they work, the roundtable session opened with a 35 mm slide presentation. The photos were taken by Zilinskas in the course of two 1994 inspections of Iraqi biological research and production facilities.

Baer and Bositis's openness in taking biology seriously is welcome and refreshing. For good reasons and bad, social scientists, including those who see themselves as feminist, have suppressed consideration of biological realities. They have tended, implicitly, to accept the notion of tabula rasa-that “blank” creature waiting to be written on by the organized forces of society-that underlies so much political theorizing in the West. As the philosopher Mary Midgley points out in her fascinating book, Beast terpretive account of human thought and action that aims for understanding and probes meaning.) The method understood as scientific, and the authors implicitly endorse it, is one that may broadly be called methodological individualism. One builds from certain rock-bottom particulars- adding them up, or relating them to one another- and the sum of these particulars is one's explanation of a given phenomenon. “Science,” says Hobbes, “is the knowledge of consequences and the dependence of one fact upon another.” I Baer and Bositis implicitly endorse this model, despite the fact that natural sclentists long ago gave up on this understanding of causality. So-although they are absolutely correct to argue that “psychological” explanation alone will not serve, nor will social learning arguments-the particular way in which they draw biology into the picture simply affixes it to the multi-causal scene as another variable or set of variables to be concatenated with many others.

As a result of the initiative, ingenuity, and dedicated efforts of Steven Peterson and James Schubert, and the generous support of Alfred University, the Conference on Empirical Biopolitics was held from July 18 to July 22, 1990, on the campus of Alfred University. Six empirical studies were presented and extensively discussed at this small and intimate conference, with two or more hours devoted to each. Discussion focused not only on the specific research questions under investigation, but also on the ramifications for inquiry in the entire field of biopolitics. Odelia Funke and Fred Kort were the designated discussants, but all presenters took part in the stimulating discussions of each paper.

Arguably, no curve in the world increases indefinitely—certainly no growth curve of human society. The quest for sustainable use of the planet involves estimating levels of activity, particularly resource use, that can continue indefinitely. Since the biosphere is dynamic, this continuation is not a stagnant, steady-state situation but rather a mutualistic interactive relationship between human society and the planet's ecological life support system. Human technology, creativity, and ingenuity may modify natural laws, but cannot be used to repeal them. Attempts to maintain the recent exponential growth of the human population, affluence, and artifacts cannot continue forever, or probably even for another century. At best, quality of life will be diminished, and, at worst, a substantial loss of human life will occur if both ethical and ecological issues are not freely and openly discussed. Sustainability may be visionary and unattainable, but it does offer an opportunity to improve the quality of life for future generations of humans and the other life forms, an opportunity that is far greater than possible with present unsustainable practices.

Let me begin by expressing my gratitude to the various commentators for their remarks about Born to Rebel, including some of the constructive criticisms of my research findings and conclusions. No book trying to set forth more than two decades of research on why historical figures as diverse as Martin Luther and Charles Darwin behaved the way they did can expect to pass muster without exception. At best, one hopes that any problems that come to light will prove to be relatively easy to correct (as I think they have been, so far) and thus do not undermine the validity of the book's central arguments.

Risk is endemic to the political arena and influences citizen engagement. We explore this connection by suggesting that risk-taking may be biologically instantiated in sensory systems. With specific attention to gender and gender identity, we investigate the connections between self-reported bitter taste reception, risk tolerance, and both of their associations with political participation. In three U.S. samples collected in 2019 and 2020, participants were asked to rate their preferences from lists of foods as well as whether they detected the taste of the substance N-Propylthiouracil (PROP) and, if so, the strength of the taste. In this registered report, we find that self-reported bitter taste preference, but not PROP detection, is positively associated with higher levels of risk tolerance as well as political participation. The pattern with gender and gender identity is mixed across our samples, but interestingly, we find that sex-atypical gender identity positively predicts political participation.

Thirty years ago there were at most only a handful of political scientists who were interested in or publishing about policy issues in the life sciences, concentrated primarily in the health or environmental policy areas. As a result, political science was notably absent as a discipline either in the literature, at conferences, or as members of state or national commissions, advisory bodies, or institutional review boards involving the life sciences.

This article proposes equating policies as species to develop a better understanding of how policies emerge, change, and diffuse across policymaking environments. Scholars have long shown an interest in understanding policy change and reinvention, whether incremental or nonincremental. The two subfields of public policy that can answer how and why policies change are not unified, leading to difficulty in comprehensively assessing policy emergence and change. The policy species concept bridges knowledge of the policy process and knowledge in the policy process by creating an operationalized definition of public policy and suggesting a process for classifying policies to observe subsequent behavior. Drawing from the field of biology, the policy species framework outlines how policies possess genotypes and phenotypes, which dictate what a policy is and how it can change. In tracing genotypic and phenetic change over time, policy evolution and change is more easily discernible. In turn, a more precise picture of how policies function is painted.

Opinion formation and information processing are affected by unconscious affective responses to stimuli—particularly in politics. Yet we still know relatively little about such affective responses and how to measure them. In this study, we focus on emotional valence and examine facial electromyography (fEMG) measures. We demonstrate the validity of these measures, discuss ways to make measurement and analysis more robust, and consider validity trade-offs in experimental design. In doing so, we hope to support scholars in designing studies that will advance scholarship on political attitudes and behavior by incorporating unconscious affective responses to political stimuli—responses that have too often been neglected by political scientists.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States is actively reshaping parts of its national security enterprise. This article explores the underlying politics, with a specific interest in the context of biosecurity, biodefense, and bioterrorism strategy, programs, and response, as the United States responds to the most significant outbreak of an emerging infectious disease in over a century. How the implicit or tacit failure to recognize the political will and political decision-making connected to warfare and conflict for biological weapons programs in these trends is explored. Securitization of public health has been a focus of the literature over the past half century. This recent trend may represent something of an inverse: an attempt to treat national security interests as public health problems. A hypothesis is that the most significant underrecognized problem associated with COVID-19 is disinformation and the weakening of confidence in institutions, including governments, and how adversaries may exploit that blind spot.

The 2020 U.S. presidential election saw rising political tensions among ordinary voters and political elites, with fears of election violence culminating in the January 6 riot. We hypothesized that the 2020 election might have been traumatic for some voters, producing measurable symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). We also hypothesized that negative sentiment toward the opposing party correlates with PTSD. We measured PTSD using a modified version of the PCL-5, a validated PTSD screener, for 573 individuals from a nationally representative YouGov sample. We modeled the association between affective polarization and PTSD, controlling for political, demographic, and psychological traits. We estimate that 12.5% of American adults (95% CI: 9.2% to 15.9%) experienced election-related PTSD, far higher than the annual PTSD prevalence of 3.5%. Additionally, negativity toward opposing partisans correlated with PTSD symptoms. These findings highlight a potential need to support Americans affected by election-related trauma.

Sleep research presents an important frontier of discovery for political science. While sleep has largely been neglected by political scientists, human psychology is inextricably linked with sleep and so political cognition must be as well. Existing work shows that sleep is linked to political participation and ideology, and that contentious politics can disrupt sleep. I propose three directions for future research—on participatory democracy, on ideology, and on how context shapes sleep-politics links. I also note that sleep research intersects with the study of political institutions, of war and conflict, of elite decision-making, and of normative theory. In short, political scientists across subfields can and should consider whether and how sleep influences political life in their area of expertise and how to influence relevant policies. This new research agenda will enrich our theories of politics and enable us to identify pressing areas for policy interventions to revitalize our democracy.

One of the more depressing thoughts that afflicts me Phoenix-like is whether or not I am in fact adding to the process of development. Will the work I am doing to affect the international transfer of biotechnology and relevant information to the developing countries help them realize an improvement in the standard of living of their people? Or, as Sanford Lakoff asks, will my work more likely result in a malaria vaccine (made possible by the application of genetic engineering techniques) that will save millions of people-only to have them face starvation? Will advances in agriculture aggravate the ongoing unsettling of populations from rural areas with all the associated miseries this implies? If and when a bioscience-based industry is established in a developing country, will the sale of its products largely benefit a few owners and corrupt officials (no doubt bought off to turn a blind eye to violations of safety codes)? Is biotechnology likely to upset social orders, thus bringing about more unrest and civil discord in individual countries?

In his article from the previous issue of the journal, “Enhancing genetic virtue: A project for twenty-first century humanity?” Mark Walker proposes an interdisciplinary effort between philosophers, psychologists, and geneticists called the Genetic Virtue Program (GVP), whose aim is to employ biotechnology some time into the future to identify genetic correlates of “virtuous” behavior, such as truthfulness, justice, and caring.