New opportunities for systematic collaboration between neuroscience and social science have opened up in recent years, and some of the potentials and the problems that accompany them are explored with reference to Damasio’s work. Systematic collaboration and integration might yield benefits for metatheoretical, theoretical and substantive inquiry, but will be impeded by language, conceptual and methodological problems. Strategies to facilitate collaboration are discussed, and it is concluded that methodological problems will be most difficult to resolve.

Scholarship on midwifery in the North American context has tended to evaluate the recent legalization of the professional practice of midwifery across the United States and Canada as evidence of the success of women’s claims to broader reproductive rights concerning pregnancy and birth. This article, however, approaches the efforts to legalize midwifery in North America through the question of claims to reproductive autonomy, arguing that midwifery’s legalization is one effect of the entrance into modern scientific practice and state health policy of a new political subject: one whose emotional satisfaction is the target of reproductive health-care policy. As such, the ‘new’ midwifery in Québec encourages pregnant and birthing women to invest intimately in the project of staking claims for reproductive self-determination. Counter to claims that the ideal citizen of contemporary liberal regimes is ‘unattached and unbiased’, midwifery compels women to invest ‘deep down’ in claims to reproductive self-determination. An examination of policy and activist discourses circulating during the time leading up to the period of experimentation (1993–1998) and eventually to the legalization (1999) of midwifery in Québec provides a useful lens onto broader transformations in the liberal governance of pregnancy and birth.

In late 1980s and early 1990s ‘breast cancer on Long Island’ emerged as a distinct object characterized by higher than average incidence rates that some speculated could be explained by environmental factors. The scientific community and its discourses have played an authoritative role in delimiting what is officially ‘known’ and ‘not known’ about this specific disease ontology. This article moves beyond an epistemological focus towards what Annemarie Mol calls a ‘praxiographical’ inquiry into the everyday practices that produce complex disease objects. We consider how multiple and multi-sited practices of mapping breast cancer on Long Island—by activists, scientists and the state—contributed to the emergence of this new object, and to its multiple and shifting enactments over time. We explore the tensions and power relations between the ‘lay’ public and scientific ‘experts’, and how these influenced mapping practices and produced ‘breast cancer on Long Island’ as a complex and ongoing politico-scientific event.

‘All of this study of genotypes will have profound consequences on our understanding of race and ethnicity’, Francis Collins, Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, warned his colleagues in 2003. At BioSocieties, we have been committed to bringing the perspectives of the social sciences to bear on the charged issues at hand. In September 2006 (Vol. 1, Part 3), we published our first forum on race and genomics, where we focused on larger questions raised by the decision of Nature Genetics to publish a special open-access supplement—Genetics for the Human Race—in November 2004, concerned with the topic of human genome variation and the continuing validity of the concept of ‘race’. In the forum, sociologist Andrew Smart and colleagues analysed the contributions to that supplement, as well as interview material from the three editors behind it, to tease out the larger methodological, scientific and ethical dilemmas that scientists in the thick of genomics and race research perceived themselves to face. Charmaine D.M. Royal, one of the contributors to Genetics for the Human Race, then responded to the issues raised by Smart and colleagues.

Many researchers working in the field of human genetics in the United States have been caught between two seemingly competing messages with regard to racial categories and genetic difference. As the human genome was mapped in 2000, Francis Collins, the head of the publicly funded project, together with his privately funded rival, announced that humans were 99.9 percent the same at the level of their genome. That same year, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) began a research program on pharmacogenetics that would exploit the .01 percent of human genetic difference, increasingly understood in racial terms, to advance the field of pharmacy. First, this article addresses Collins’ summary of what he called the ‘vigorous debate’ on the relationship between race and genetics in the open-access special issue of Nature Genetics entitled ‘Genetics for the Human Race’ in 2004. Second, it examines the most vexed (if not always openly stated) issue at stake in the debate: that many geneticists today work with the assumption that human biology differs by race as it is conceived through American census categories. It then presents interviews with researchers in two collaborating US laboratories who collect and organize DNA by American notions of ‘race/ethnicity’ and assume that US race categories of classification largely traduce human biogenetic difference. It concludes that race is a practical and conceptual tool whose utility and function is often taken for granted rather than rigorously assessed and that ‘rational medicine’ cannot precede a rational approach to addressing the nature of racial disparities, difference and inequality in health and society more broadly.

Following the stringent critiques of organizers of the Human Genome Diversity Project for excluding people from the initiative’s early planning, subsequent administrators of high-profile efforts to study human genetic variation, such as the International HapMap Project, have made great efforts to stress the importance of including the people who are to be the objects of study in research design and regulation. Such efforts to ‘democratize’ genomics would appear to represent a positive development. However, in practice they have satisfied few as they fail to recognize the most basic lesson of the Human Genome Diversity Project debates: genomics raises questions not just about the inclusion of people, but about their very constitution. Positing concrete, stable subjects in society, current efforts to ‘democratize’ genomics fail to recognize that entangled in the fundamental questions about nature posed by this emergent form of technoscience are fundamental questions about the order and constitution of societies. The creation of sustainable and desirable forms of governance require us to come to terms with challenges posed to liberal democratic practices and values, such as inclusion, in an age defined partially by this mutual dis/ordering of nature and society.

‘Racial’ or ‘ethnic’ drugs, a product of the new genetics and its mapping of genomes and populations, are now being developed and manufactured on a large scale. This article focuses on the conceptualization and identification of genetic signatures at the population level, many of which, I argue, evoke the ancient and quite common folk idiom of bodily inscription—in particular, fingerprints and birthmarks. The current geneticization of ‘colour’ and the biosociality engendered by it, I suggest, invite critical rethinking of the concept of insular populations and the distinction between bodily surface and deep structures (phenotype and genotype). While the new genetics has shifted the conceptual ground for discussions of human variation, moving away from phenotypic traits such as markings of the skin, drawing attention to what some molecular biologists refer to as the ‘universe within’, the notion of racial difference is repeatedly reinvented along familiar lines, under the banner of populations studies. I argue that, although human variation is both a legitimate and important subject in its own right and some approaches to variation do a better job than others, researchers need to be attentive to their assumptions about sampling. Circularity and subjectivity seem to be inevitable parts of the exploration of human diversity, and sampling cannot take place without a subjective, pragmatic judgment about how to proceed.