Taking the example of Craig Venter’s marine bio-prospecting expedition, this article explores the effects that bioinformatics and sequencing technologies have had upon the process of bio-prospecting. What kind of an aggregate is a collection that spans evolutionary ecologies, database logics and programmable synthetic organisms? And by means of what displacements, translations and topologies are genetic collections ‘made up’ in the age of bioinformatics and synthetic biology?

After an interruption of almost 20 years, psychopharmacological research on hallucinogenic drugs was revived in several countries simultaneously around 1990. Most of the projects that have been initiated since then have been based on the conception of model psychosis: by administering hallucinogens to healthy test subjects, psychiatrists induce a state regarded as an artificial and temporary psychosis, which can be studied under controlled experimental conditions in the laboratory. As a model of psychosis, the hallucinogen intoxication is meant to provide important clues to schizophrenia research. This article examines the history of the concept and practice of model psychosis in order to demarcate the peculiarities of its most recent articulation in the vocabulary of cognitive neuroscience. It highlights the shift from phenomenological to biological psychiatry. The analysis contributes to an understanding of the ‘regional epistemology’ of psychopharmacology by reflecting on the question: what kind of a model is the hallucinogen model of psychosis?

The placebo effect is variously vilified as a basis for unethical medical practice, dismissed as the ephemeral product of gullible imaginations, sanctioned as key to the clinical trials process, and romanticized as evidence of the mind’s quasi-miraculous power to heal the body. These many meanings of the placebo effect exist for a reason: they are products of multiple histories whose legacies continue to be upheld by various stakeholders in debates in which placebos and their effects figure today.

In this article we undertake some conceptual clarification of the concepts of biopower and biopolitics, and argue for their utility in contemporary analysis. We consider Foucault's development of these concepts, and differentiate his view, which is close to ours, from the philosophical take-up of the terms by Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri. Biopower, we suggest, entails one or more truth discourses about the ‘vital’ character of living human beings; an array of authorities considered competent to speak that truth; strategies for intervention upon collective existence in the name of life and health; and modes of subjectification, in which individuals work on themselves in the name of individual or collective life or health. We argue that, while exceptional forms of biopower, especially in conditions of absolutist dictatorship, and when combined with certain technical resources, can lead to a murderous ‘thanatopolitics’—a politics of death—biopower in contemporary states takes a different form. It characteristically entails a relation between ‘letting die’ (laissez mourir) and making live (faire vivre)—that is to say strategies for the governing of life. Using examples from our own current research, we consider recent developments in biopower around three themes: race, population and reproduction, and genomic medicine.

The methods and theoretical repertoire of the biomedical sciences are undergoing rapid change fuelled, first and foremost, by advances in genomics and molecular biology. At the same time, social and environmental phenomena are being incorporated in new ways into medical frames of reference affecting professional practice as well as regimes of prevention and health promotion. In turn, these developments impact upon the social sciences and humanities concerned with new forms of dynamic corporealities in social and medical practice. This article outlines in a programmatic fashion three sets of issues that are likely to acquire significant relevance in this context: (1) looping effects will emerge along different pathways between medical diagnosis, selfhood, social practice and the body itself. The investigation of these dynamic interactions has so far received little attention in the social sciences and will require the development of a different methodological approach to do justice to different kinds of data and long-term effects. (2) Advances in the understanding of epigenetic regulation have begun to fundamentally change notions of inheritance and development and to differentiate the central dogma of genetics (DNA makes RNA makes Protein), with significant implications for notions of interand intra-generational responsibility and biographical time regimes. (3) The incorporation of ‘things social’ into medical domains is being taken to a new level of significance, fuelled by a number of fundamental shifts in medical reasoning and practice. The social sciences’ current focus on (epi)genetics can only be a starting point for a broader interdisciplinary agenda to better understand the pathways through which ‘the social and cultural’ enters the body. The final section of this article discusses somatography as a practice-oriented approach attempting to address some of these issues in a symmetrical investigation across epistemic cultures.

While social phobia is a well-known disorder in North America, it has been little known among the general French population. For several years now a small group of French clinicians and members of a social phobia support group have begun fighting for its recognition. Their voices have had a significant impact, and today information about the disorder has reached thousands or even millions of French citizens. The introduction of social phobia in France involves more than the acceptance of this one condition. Social phobia is a part of a standard North American diagnostic system that remains marginal in France; this therapeutic framework must be adopted in order for social phobia to be accepted. This article focuses on the words of French physicians, many of whom reject social phobia as a diagnosis, and a smaller number who are desperate for its acceptance. Through their words, I trace the multiple factors that are slowing the acceptance of social phobia, but not preventing it. Culture, history, economy and single-minded careerism are among the factors that clinicians link to the appearance of social phobia in France. In conclusion, I consider the argument that social phobia in France is an example of the global exportation of North American conceptions of mental health and mental disorder.

It is widely recognized that traditional informed consent requirements are highly problematic in the context of population-based genetic research. This article is based on a qualitative study that describes and analyses the consenting procedures and perceptions of donors to the North Cumbria Community Genetics Project (NCCGP), a DNA bank in northwest England. The NCCGP collected placenta and cord tissue, as well as maternal blood samples and health and lifestyle information, in order to conduct genetic epidemiological studies. The findings show that the nature of the sample (i.e. afterbirth) significantly impacted donors’ decision to donate. The antenatal context also influenced the way the request was framed to potential donors, who had a limited understanding of the aims of the biobank. However, the article concludes that a lack of understanding on the part of donors is not necessarily an ethical problem and that efforts to re-think informed consent guidelines may benefit from paying greater attention to the factors that motivate people to donate in the first place.