BIOSBIOS NewsIssue 18 • Summer Term 2011

In this issue

Editorial 1

BIOS Impact: BIOS News Editorial Team and Nikolas Rose 2

Through the Looking-Glass, and What I Found There: Devising biosociality as a pharmaceutical repertoire: Angela Marques Filipe 4

Call for Entries: Research@BIOS Short Film Competition 7

Social Scientists meeting on Synthetic Biology: Caitlin Cockerton 8

Postcard from Btihaj Ajana 9

Research updates from Jamie Morgan Evans and Sara Tocchetti 10

Upcoming events 10

Publications and conference presentations 12

BIOS News Issue 18 • Summer 2011 1

Connecting the technologies with the socials

EditorialResearch is about many things: the quest for knowledge, seeking solutions, searching for the cause of things, crafting better perspectives, etc. But good research often has one thing is common: it benefits from and contributes to different realms of society.

In the first interview piece, ‘BIOS Impacts’, Nikolas Rose, Director of the BIOS Centre, gives an overview to the BIOS News Editorial Team on the roles of BIOS research and core BIOS staff in many British scientific governing bodies. BIOS’ attentiveness to the real world experience of new technologies by researchers, clinicians, patients and the public bring a level of empirical data and empirical analysis to many regulatory debates that may otherwise be largely speculative. Some ongoing involvement in connecting the technologies with the social can also be found in this issue. Caitlin Cockerton reports on the pilot ESRC seminar series on synthetic biology and the social sciences. This seminar series will explore the possibility of developing an interdisciplinary research agenda for the analysis of this emerging field. Angela Marques Filipe, a BIOS PhD candidate working on the clinical practices of ADHD, shares with us the ‘biosociality’ she observed at a recent pharmaceutical conference. Research updates from Jamie Morgan Evans tells sport fans how biomechanic research may have shaped their game. Sara Tocchetti, who soon will go off on fieldwork, reminds us of how technologies have transformed the norm of contemporary research activities. Finally we have a postcard from old BIOSian Btihaj Ajana, who recently secured a book contract with Palgrave Macmillan.

BIOS also invites everyone to participate in making academic research more accessible to society. The Research@BIOS Short Film Competition deadline has been extended. BIOS would like to find innovative ways of drawing non-academic users to our research using excerpts of our events and interviews, translated into accessible formats. These videos will be made accessible on global mass dissemination platforms.

Last but not least, for the latest news and events, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/LSEBIOS

The BIoS News team

Socials

Technologies

BIOS News Editorial Team and Nikolas Rose1

2 BIOS News Issue 18 • Summer 2011

The 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) is the new process for assessing research in UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and is the successor to the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). As laid out by the Higher Education Funding Council or England (HEFCE), one of the REF’s aims is to assess an academic institution’s impact on ‘any identifiable benefit to or positive influence on the economy, society, public policy or services, culture, the environment or quality of life.’ In other words, the upcoming REF invites academics to reflect on how their work contributes to solving real world problems. The BIOS News Editorial Team (E) interviewed Professor Nikolas Rose (NR), Director of the BIOS Centre, on how BIOS sees its ‘impact’, especially in the realm of life sciences’ governance.

E: What does ‘research impact’ mean for social scientists working in BIoS? In what ways have BIoS researchers made an impact?

NR: The BIOS Centre has always made connections between our own research and developments in the life sciences. We’ve also done quite a bit of research on ‘translation’, exploring the obstacles, problems and gaps between basic life science research and their future applications in the medical, pharmaceutical or biotechnology industries. Professor Sarah Franklin, along with other colleagues in the Sociology Department, has also done a study on ‘the impact of impact’ , addressing the question of how an emphasis on impact as a category of assessment in the REF is likely to influence research efforts. All research on translation demonstrates that it is very rare that one single piece of research, or even a single program of research can be identified as responsible, in any simple causal manner, with a particular clinical or policy impact. For research’s influence on policy-making and changes in clinical practices it’s a more complicated process that happens over a long time-scale, usually entails the concatenation of a range of distinct research findings and practical demands, and depends on various contingent external factors.

However, one of the ways in which we exert our own impact is through our involvement in the deliberation of policy making bodies, advisory groups and the work of regulators. Most of the BIOS core staff have been on these bodies in various ways. Professor Sarah Franklin has established a wide network of connections within the scientific community in the UK, such as the Wellcome Trust, the British Fertility Association and the Association of Clinical Embryologists. Dr. Ilina Singh has been a consultant to health policy working groups in the US and the UK, including the UK National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH)/Hastings Center Working Group on Drugs in Pediatric Psychiatry. Professor Emily Jackson is also a member of a number of regulatory and advisory bodies, such as the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority, and the British Medical Association Medical Ethics Committee. I have been on a number of such bodies, most recently: the Nuffield Council of Bioethics, a Working Party of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and the Brain Waves project set up by the Royal Society which examines the implications and development of the neurosciences.

E: What are the main tasks of these deliberative bodies and how do they function?

NR: In the field of the life sciences, many organizations have set up advisory and deliberative bodies to consider the social and ethical issues arising from specific developments. This seems to suggest a common belief that there is something happening at the frontier of the life sciences that is of crucial importance that needs to be reflected upon. Most of these committees and working groups consist of an interesting mixture of disciplines, such as scientists, clinicians, lawyers, theologians, political scientists, social scientists and historians. They tend to be set up around the cutting-edge of the technologies rather than the accepted and routinized technologies – which may be a weakness. Not all of these committees lead to legislation. For example, as the guardian of British sciences, the Royal Society selects key topics on which to set up its committees/working groups, such as the Brain Waves project I’m a member of, and make policy statements regarding certain issues of scientific development. But what role these policy statements play in the regulatory landscape may not always be clear. However, one shouldn’t take what these committees do lightly, for some of these deliberations scope out future policy directions which may influence the future scientific governance landscape in a less direct manner.

This is especially the case with the Nuffield Council, which is the nearest thing that the UK has to a ‘national’ bioethics commission. Unlike the national bioethics councils that have been set up in many countries, it is an independent (i.e. non-government) organization funded by the Nuffield Foundation, the Wellcome Trust and the Medical Research Council. Thus it exercises its own selection procedure for its membership (using an independent panel), chooses its own topics, and works in its own way. In many countries, the government would refer urgent questions to national bioethics councils, and press for deliberation and decision making. However this does not apply to the Nuffield Council, which tends to identify areas which have medium to long-term health-related social impacts – for example as long ago as 1993 it published a report on the ethical issues around genetic screening, and other reports have looked at such issues as xenotransplantation, clinical research in developing countries, the forensic uses of bioinformation, dementia, ethical issues in public health, and the move to personalization in medicine; currently it is looking at biofuels, donation of tissues and organs, and neurotechnologies.

E: How do social scientists relate their work to the function of these policy-making bodies?

NR: This is an intriguing question because a lot of what we do here in BIOS is to study just this – that is to say, the ways in which life sciences are governed. From this perspective, one can see that these deliberative bodies are part of the complex governance machinery that has been set up around life sciences over the last 20 years. So on the one hand, experiences on these bodies are instructive for social scientists in the sense that it helps one understand the ways in which governance is developing within the life sciences. While on

BIOS Impacts

BIOS News Issue 18 • Summer 2011 3

the other hand it is an interesting and potentially important opportunity for social scientists to be involved in those deliberations and, in an indirect way, shapes the environment within which scientific research is to take place. From my experience, many of the arguments that we make at BIOS, including conceptual and theoretical arguments, as well as our empirical evidence on the real world experience of these new technologies by researchers, clinicians, patients and the public, are seen as relevant and important by these committees. So I don’t think our research is or should be directed only to a purely academic audience: we aim to have an impact in the real world, while recognizing the indirect ways in which such impact is achieved.

E: Why is contribution from social scientists important to these deliberations?

NR: The social scientists who get to be invited to these committees bring a level of empirical data and empirical analysis to the debates that may otherwise be largely speculative. As we all know, other experts on these committees, such as scientists, philosophers and bioethicists, also speculate about social and cultural impact. Often those speculations are wide of the mark, because they do not take account of what is known about how ‘emerging technologies’ do, or do not, actually gain traction in the real world. Empirical social science research may enable these regulatory bodies to see that actually it’s not always these speculative consequences of the high profile leading edge technologies that one needs to worry about. One may also have to think about things happening elsewhere, perhaps at the less visible areas of practices, as they develop in a wider social, cultural and historical context.

For example, the neurosciences is one of the areas that generated much hype and speculation. In these discussions, empirical knowledge is most valuable. For example, there has been a lot of speculation about the threat of neuroscience to hallowed ideas of ‘free will’. But it is quite clear to me that one of the main consequences of the neurosciences on the legal and criminal justice system will not be around these grand issues of free will in decisions about guilt or innocence in the courtroom. Rather, the most important things may be happening outside the dock, in preventative strategies, in identifying people who are thought to be risky before they have committed any offence, or after they have served their sentence, in using neuro lie detection technologies outside the courtroom, not within it, etc.

Another example is the working party on research using animals containing human materials set up by the Academy of Medical Sciences. Recently in the UK there was quite a well publicized debate about the idea of human-animal hybrids, especially regarding the possibility of using human genetic or cellular material together with animal eggs. But few people wondered about the other side of this question: not about inserting animal material into humans, but about the research usage of animals that have significant human materials in them. For example, research involving

transferring the gene sequences from humans thought to be linked to diseases into animals and then using these animals to test drugs or to research the disease pathways. To what extent here is one ‘humanizing’ the animal? And where are the limits – mouse models are of course the most common, but larger animals including pigs are used to study organs including the heart, and when it comes to issues of neurobiology – as in research on neurodegenerative diseases – mice are probably not ideal models, and researchers may think non-human primates are more appropriate. What limits should there be for such research? There are two sides to this question: one is whether you are creating additional suffering to these animals, for example, by increasing their levels of sentience; the other is whether you are creating an entity whose very existence is problematic. Sociologists, anthropologists and historians know that human/animal boundaries are crucial in almost every culture we have studied – even if the distinctions we make between those animals we eat, those we revere, and those we have as pets are hardly rational! Yet we know that animal models have been crucially important for understanding human diseases that cause great suffering to members of our own species, and for testing drugs that have saved many human lives. So the questions raised by such research are both socially very important, ethically quite problematic, and conceptually very interesting. And I think social scientists have something to contribute to such deliberations, over and above organizing surveys of public opinion, however important they are.

These are just some examples of the way that social scientists may help make some of the wider issues visible to such bodies. Unfortunately in my view, it tends to be mainly ‘senior’ academics who get to sit on these committees. I’ve also been urging these deliberative committees to take in more young social scientists, who have a lot to contribute to the analysis of these problems.

E: How do you evaluate BIoS’ impact on these policy-making bodies?

NR: We are proud that so many BIOS staff are involved in these bodies. The very fact that some of our own research priorities – for example Sarah Franklin’s work on reproductive technologies and regenerative medicine, Carrie Friese’s work on animal models, and my own work on neurotechnologies, Claire Marris’ work on strategies for public engagement on emerging technologies and our work on synthetic biology – are also on exactly the kinds of questions that these regulatory bodies have chosen for their investigation, at least it shows that we are feeling the pulse. It is difficult to be precise about the ways our research makes a difference to the governance of life sciences: the ‘the benefits to the economy, society, public policy and services’, as HEFCE put it, are always indirect and usually difficult to explicate in precise terms. But I think we can certainly say that, in an indirect way, our research which feeds our input into these decision-making making bodies, does help to shape how some of these crucial problems are understood and helps to place them in a wider historical, cultural and social context.

1Nikolas Rose is the James Martin White Professor of Sociology, and the Director of the BIOS Centre, LSE

2www.hefce.ac.uk/Research/ref/

3http://lse-impact.blogspot.com/

‘We aim to have an impact in the real world, while recognizing the indirect ways in which such impact is balanced’

This is the story of a conference, sponsored by the pharmaceutical company Shire. The conference was called: Through the looking glass: bringing ADHD into focus that took place in November 2010. My supervisor Dr Ilina Singh, was a key speaker5 and invited me to the conference so that I could gather some materials for my research and conduct a form of ‘second’ hand observation. The idea was to collect formal and public material, while simultaneously observing the intersubjectivities and informal discussions amongst conference participants.

The social sciences have offered us intriguing accounts about the growing role of pharmaceutical industry in the biomedical, genomics or patient’s domains. The term ‘Big Pharma’ is frequently used to describe how the pharmaceutical industry makes its own way into political, biomedical and activist milieus. However, my emphasis in this article is on the new modes of devising biosocialities as part of pharmaceutical companies’ repertoires. By using the concept of biosocialities, I take on the conceptual work of Paul Rabinow, who pointed out, in predictive fashion, that biosociality would become a mode of network creation around the biological, the genetic, and the biomedical, gathering patients, doctors, researchers, and counselors, among others. I take the term from its original site and use it here to elucidate how pharmaceutical companies promote certain modes of community-building, production of education and knowledge, and clinical debate.I will define ‘repertoire’ as the mode of action that penetrates a visible institutional narrative and is, in turn, deployed as a means of carrying out and continuing an action. Through the Shire case, I attempt to highlight that some pharmaceutical companies have seized the prospective and productive repertoire underneath the biosocialities that are, partially, devised through continuous sponsorship and organization of meetings.

‘Through the Looking Glass’ was one of the annual meetings Shire sponsors and organises for health professionals, researchers and, also, families. Renowned experts from around the world were brought to the fore as main speakers. The meeting was held in a hotel, and set up in ‘wedding’ style, with attendees seated at round tables facing a large stage. Various gadgets, medical marketing and publicity were spread across the reception rooms. Among these were a number of brochures with guidelines and advice to parents and teachers, for instance: ‘Better Days. A family handbook for ADHD’ and ‘ADHD and its treatment’, published by Shire. The doctors, nurses, researchers and counselors who were present were, to some extent, part of an epistemic community, due to a background of scientific expertise in the field. Together, they represented a community of practices, due to their professional situations and activities, and a social community of individuals

who share common concerns about their clinical, scientific and research practices as interventions in the social world. The pharmaceutical company became, not naively, the formal sponsor capable of promoting such community-building processes, allowing the participants to share their knowledge and experience outside the professional setting. Nevertheless, elements of ambiguity and uncertainty also emerge when those experts speak, especially in informal context, about the problems tackled in their daily lives, a process that takes, at times, quite an emotional tone.

The first feelings inside the meeting were in fact those of a regular interpersonal experience, framed by the conversations at the coffee-break. Presumably, the ‘community’ inside the venue had been built a long time ago, through a number of meetings, interactions and shared experiences in the ‘biosocial network’. When I identified myself as a social scientist, I discovered the sociological imagination amongst some clinicians. Attendees found several questions to pose to me: ‘Are social and economic elements the determinants of the incidence of attention-deficit hyperactivity [ADHD] in certain groups?’; ‘Is ADHD diagnosis based in the definition of impairment/disability being pushed forward by parents and families?’ The conversation was soon interrupted as we were summoned for the first morning session.

The keynote speaker to take the lead was Dr Mary Solanto, a renowned expert in this field and member of the committee reviewing the definition of ADHD subtypes for DSM-V Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [DSM]6. The revised edition is expected in May 2013. As, Dr Solanto pointed out, DSM-V will reconceptualise the criteria for the diagnosis of ADHD; it will include more impulsivity symptoms, a new ‘pure inattentive subtype’ of ADHD, and it will identify the age of onset as 12 years old. Speaking about the subtypes, Dr. Solanto said they should be seen as flexible entities because in many cases children will move across subtypes as they grow up and the predominantly hyperactive type is a precursor of the combined one. Dr Solanto also admitted that the subtypes of ADHD were being maintained in DSM-V despite a lack of genetics and neuroimaging evidence for distinct subtypes. The reason for this was, she mentioned, that research would cease if the subtypes were eroded because the major funding comes from NIH [National Institutes of Health] and that funding is based on DSM criteria. At the same time, she added, erasing the existent subtypes could generate massive confusion in the public and its perceptions. As acknowledged by many sociologists and scientists, DSM is not about natural categorical entities but much more about the compromise-situations that apply to clinical and social components of behavioral and developmental conditions.

Through the Looking-Glass, and What I Found There: devising biosociality as a pharmaceutical repertoire

Angela Marques Filipe4

4 BIOS News Issue 18 • Summer 2011

Presenting new data and considerations on the VOICES project7 research and outcomes, Dr. Ilina Singh then focused on what she called ‘empirical ethics’ and the distinctive features of ADHD in the UK and US. In the UK context, the majority of children see ADHD mainly as a ‘disorder of anger’, while in the US, ADHD is usually represented more as ‘disorder of classroom performance’. Using both textual and audio excerpts of interviews with children, as well as their drawings (see examples in pictures), children’s representations were presented. Dr Singh proposed that the audience of clinicians to take on a role as ‘moral investigators’ within the issues and ethicalities raised by ADHD medication. Surprisingly, voicing the children’s representations of stimulant drug treatment and living with ADHD, created a cathartic effect among the audience. Two major reasons for this effect were to become visible in the discussion later on: clinicians feel that in the clinic there is little time for dialogical interaction with children and families. On the other hand, clinicians feel the burden of their role as gatekeepers amongst a complex network of competing forces, ranging from private companies to public school teachers. If sociology of medicine and medical anthropology have explored the role of the doctors as moral entrepreneurs, I will also explore their potential role as moral gatekeepers. A short break takes place after the premiere of the ‘Going for Gold’ film: a short documentary starring Liam Palmer, his mother and his Tae Kon Dow instructor. This is a success story

of a boy diagnosed with ADHD, medication-naive who is using martial arts as his ‘therapeutic key’.

In her afternoon presentation, Katya Rubia, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at King’s College London, focused on the relations between neuroimaging techniques and clinical practice. A broad account of the major neuroimaging techniques was provided, ranging from EEG, PET, fMRI, SPECT, to NIRS and diffusion tensor imaging. Professor Rubia pointed out that recent research suggested ADHD cannot be linked to impairment in a specific area of the brain, nor can it be ascribed to the activities of certain neurotransmitters and receptors. Rather, as her new research points out, ADHD is a disorder of widespread deficits. Thus the diagnostic role of neuroimaging in clinical practice would seem to be limited. The presentations ended with Peter Hill, Professor and Consultant in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. His talk concerned medication and the possibilities of individual treatment. For Professor Hill, individual treatment means doing the right thing for an individual patient. In this case, he acknowledged that although ADHD is a very heterogeneous condition, certain unifying elements allowed all the attendees to talk about ADHD.

In this second part of the conference, I became aware that there was a fair amount of shared knowledge among participants, about stimulant medication, the efficacies

4 Angela Marques Filipe is a PhD candidate at the BIOS Centre LSE. Her research focus is on the clinical practices of ADHD. She is also interested in the roles of patient organizations, biology and politics interface; and research methodologies.

5* Dr Singh accepted no compensation of any kind for her participation in this meeting.

6 The classification system and guideline for mental disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA).

7 VOICES is a Wellcome Trust funded research project based within the BIOS Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science. More info at www.adhdvoices.com.

BIOS News Issue 18 • Summer 2011 5

Lottie, 12, VOICES project

of different drug compounds, their clinical consequences, complementary non-medical therapies, and so forth. These matters of fact that is, the stabilized knowledge and practices concerning ADHD, seemed to be reasonably consensual. Nevertheless, clinicians and researchers are quite conscious of the limitations they face, in practice: possible alternative therapies, such as sports and education, could have the same protective effects in the brain as medication; diagnostic guidelines might be reliable but nonetheless scarcely valid; there are diagnostic divergences depending on national and cultural context; there is the critique of medicalisation; and so forth. These matters of concern, that is, issues which are highly political and extremely difficult to deal with, were disclosed in participants’ questions and comments. Hence, such matters of fact and matters of concern constitute, more often than we could imagine, the narrative worlds of these clinicians whose practices carry both potential and ambiguity.

Thus, the need to sharing knowledge and experience appears to have been grasped by some pharmaceutical companies. The industry is now responsible also for the education and attribution of training credits to those practitioners who come into these meetings, or it is responsible for new interactive platforms of information for diagnostic file-sharing. Research, knowledge, training and information are being deployed through a repertoire that resembles, in the long-term, much more of a biosocial network that an institutional platform. Nevertheless, it is that flexible character and the fragmented

nature of the pieces of information shared, that allows such repertoire to be more pervasive and more effective. Sociality and shared knowledge are valued in new ways and simultaneously create new networks within biomedical communities. None of these are terribly new. They all belong to a longer tradition of bridging the gap between drug and consumer, producer and prescriber. During this process, personal and social networks are also developed which generate certain loyalties, representations and forms of trust. This point has been made by several social scientists who study the pharma-world.

However, this particular aspect has a new flavour to it: pharmaceutical companies are now becoming key actors in producing these new socialities. The morals of philanthropy, the social responsibility of companies, and even social entrepreneurship make up increasingly commonplace discourses within the corporate sector. But to look at the more private repertoires of this particular industry may provide further insights for the place of biology, clinics, politics and sociality. Peering through the looking glass, I could perceive the very root of the pharmakon, both poison and remedy, channelled into the present in new forms of ambivalence. Therefore, the social critique could then focus, not only on the modes of extraction ‘pharma’ performed in the social world, but also on the modes of production of the social emerging in the pharma-world.

6 BIOS News Issue 18 • Summer 2011

Lottie, 12, VOICES project

BIOS News Issue 18 • Summer 2011 7

Research@BIOS Short Film Competition

A key skill in the information age is getting the message out there: anyone can broadcast anything, but how do you get noticed? LSE has always produced outstanding ideas, now we’re looking for ways to make those ideas stand out.

That’s why we’re looking for designers, animators, and communicators who can make ideas come to life. We’ll supply a short audio clip, and we’re looking to you to make it visually compelling.

As an aspiring filmmaker and communicator, it’s a chance for you to work on a live brief, and have your work exposed to an audience in the hundreds of thousands.

As for what form the film should take: we’re relying on your imagination. It could be stop-motion, cell animation, 3D, typographic, live-action. If we knew what we were looking for, we wouldn’t be asking you. Show us what you can do.

The brief Biomedicine and biotechnology are changing our world, our lives, and ourselves

Our capacity to intervene in the development of life in its earliest stages, to create novel life forms that defy classification, and to peer inside the workings of the human brain, while offering much promise, pose innumerable, and frequently unknowable, social and ethical risks.

BIOS is currently producing an Online Video Series of short films on our research projects. We would like to find innovative ways of drawing non-academic users to our research using excerpts of our events and interviews with researchers, translated into accessible formats. These videos will be made accessible on global mass dissemination platforms such as the LSE Channels on iTunesU and YouTube.

We want you to create a 2-minute video using either of the audio clips by Professor Nikolas Rose, available from our website. You can use stop-motion, cell animation, 3D, typographic, live-action. You decide.

The winning entries will be posted on our website* and the winner may have the opportunity of collaborating with us on the Research@BIOS Online Video Series.

Closing date of entry: 4 aPRIL 2011 – EXTENDED DEaDLINE

Prizes:

1 x Winner: £200 in Amazon vouchers

2 x Runners-up: £50 Amazon vouchers

For the full brief and how to apply see:

lse.ac.uk/BIOS/videoCompetition2011/home.aspx

Supported by the

*subject to copyright and terms and conditions being met.

8 BIOS News Issue 18 • Summer 2011

Caitlin Cockerton8

8Caitlin Cockerton is a PhD candidate at the BIOS Centre, LSE

Social Scientists meeting on Synthetic Biology, ESRC Seminar Series, Seminar 1

On February 14 and 15, with little candied hearts beside everyone’s folder and notepad (going some way to make up for our lack of Valentine’s celebration?), twenty social scientists who look at various aspects of synthetic biology set out to discuss ‘defining the agenda’ of ‘our’ research in this emerging biotechnology. The key questions for this first seminar (in a series of four or five over the coming year) were as follows:

• What’s happening? Are we seeing a change in the relationship between the social and the natural sciences? What forms is this taking? Is it different from ELSI? Is it a widespread phenomenon? What are examples of success? What are examples of failure?

• What are we doing? What is expected of us as social scientists? What roles do we play? How do we avoid unwanted expectations? What do we bring to these new interdisciplinary collaborations? What expertise do we have?

• What would we like to be doing? What would we like to be doing, ideally? What would a social scientific contribution to synthetic biology look like? What would the aims of it be?

• Are there guiding ideas / theories that we might usefully adopt?

The seminar involved four keynote presentations on specific approaches to social science engagement with synthetic biology, with plenty of open discussion and collective note-taking that sought to map some answers to the questions above.

Nikolas Rose offered his view that an interesting sociological site of intervention – one of ‘sociology and biology after critique’ – is to engage at the level of thought itself. Rose believes that one avenue of valuable research would be to inquire into the modes of biological reasoning that are currently being played out in the development of synthetic biology, in order to ask what this might mean for a philosophy of life and the living. Perhaps through an engagement at that level – what is synthetic biology as a philosophy of life? – humanities scholars may interact with scientists and engineers in order to shape our future.

The seminar group also heard from Gaymon Bennett who has spent recent years working in the ‘Human Practices thrust’ of the SynBERC initiative, alongside several keynote synthetic biologists in the US. With perhaps the most extensive experience in finding, defining and writing about modes of collaboration in this area, I shall simply refer interested readers to the following websites for further insights into this work: http://bios-technika.net/index.php; http://anthropos-lab.net/arcstudio/; http://ars-synthetica.net/. However, I might add one incredibly thought-provoking line that Bennett shared with the group. He told us of a scientist, with whom he’d had a long-

standing ‘collaboration’, asking him one evening at a party, ‘So, Gaymon, what’s it like being synthetic biology’s trophy wife?’ As one can imagine, the group spent a good deal of time breaking down the meanings of that comment!

Sara Aguiton, an STS PhD student, shared with the group stories from her 2009 fieldwork while embedded in the Paris iGEM team. With several interesting anecdotes – though difficult personal experiences at the time of engagement – Sara’s talk opened up conversations about a kind of vulnerability of field-workers when they face their role of embedment under a false pretence of ‘collaboration’.

Finally, the group heard from Alison Mohr and Sujatha Raman on their experiences as embedded STS researchers in the BBSRC Sustainable Bioenergy Centre (BSBEC). They discussed the role of embedded social scientists as ‘an instrument of governance’ and as ‘the dupe’ in order to illustrate some ‘risky entanglements’ they have faced in their interactions with scientists. Mohr and Raman also discussed their preferred roles to act as ‘bearers of ambivalence’ and ‘catalysts in an experiment’.

In the end, the seminar group had mapped out a ‘manifesto’ (deciding that we preferred that term to ‘agenda’) to guide future seminars of the series. We now seek to tackle a list of problems; share our strategies – successful and failed – from fieldwork experiences with synthetic biologists; carve out new methods that incorporate our own academic traditions as well as the methods of scientists and engineers; and, of course, ask several more questions!

BIOS News Issue 18 • Summer 2011 9

Across the road Btihaj Ajana9

I can still recall how, in the middle of the madness of finishing my PhD last year while anxiously applying for academic jobs, I was invaded by the feeling that my life was about to take a completely different twist, a radical change at least geographically if not otherwise. I did not expect that the next chapter of my life would be unfolding just across the road at King’s College and even less in a permanent lectureship position few weeks after my PhD viva.

As I imagined, the start was extremely hectic but also exciting. And working jointly in two departments (Centre for Media, Culture and Creative Industries, and the Department of Digital Humanities) has certainly exposed me to both the benefits and the practical challenges of interdisciplinarity. I spent the first term of the academic year designing, developing and teaching my own module ‘Digital Ontologies’ (a course on the role of digital media in reshaping our notions of identity and in creating different modes of being-in-the-world), redesigning and teaching on the MA programme in Digital Culture and Society (which examines the relationship between digital technology and culture with a focus on the socio-political and ethical implications), and contributing to the MA programme in Culture and Creative Industries. In a way and in terms of teaching, this position feels like something of an intellectual homecoming in the sense that I am now revisiting themes and issues similar to those I encountered during my BA and MA studies and in my professional experience in the media industry.

In addition to my teaching tasks, I have also been engaged in disseminating my PhD research findings through networking activities and attending various workshops and conferences (one of which was the ESRC Workshop: Problematising Danger in which I presented a paper under the title ‘Re-ontologising Danger’. I will also be presenting a paper entitled ‘Biometrics and Recombinant Identities’ at the British Sociological Association Annual Conference in April). And I recently secured a book contract with Palgrave Macmillan to publish my PhD thesis.

So a lot seems to have happened during the last six months and I am learning a great deal in the process. This, however, does not overshadow the life-defining experience of conducting a PhD in BIOS, an experience that have prepared me (more than I was aware of) to what was to come in my academic life. I am therefore very appreciative of the time I spent in BIOS, of Nikolas’ guidance and support, and very grateful to the great people I met there.

I miss you and love you all and I am glad that, at the end of the day, I am just across the road!

Btihaj

Postcards to BIOS

9 Btihaj Ajana is Lecturer in Culture, Digital Humanities and Creative Industries, Kings College London.

Research updates

10 BIOS News Issue 18 • Summer 2011

Jamie Morgan Evans, PhD Candidate

The great phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty says ‘I now refer to my body only as an idea’. The phenomenal footballer Zinedine Zidane says ‘I had a running commentary in my own head, when I was playing. It wasn’t really my own voice. It was the voice of Pierre Cangion. A television anchor from the 1970s.’ Psychic factors and physiological conditions seemingly gear into one another. But there is a compelling history in both accounts, a mixing of volition and memory, of concentration with the retrospective.

Zidane’s romantic revelation reveals very little about the forces producing his physiological action and Merleau-Ponty himself admits that consciousness only observes the ‘reflex movements’ in our bodies. If we are perhaps unable to account for how reflexes react to certain stimuli, then certain sciences offer eye-opening representations. It could be said that a science like biomechanics turns what is ‘absent’ in experience into a known and insentient entity. Technical performance pays little attention to ‘what’ the internal body does; its focus is upon its own physicality and the actions of other bodies. And, suddenly, the absent body comes to the fore, it experiences pain and injury or it fatigues, nauseates and loses its ‘internal voice and rhythm’. What is lost in this body experience? What new forms of knowledge are brought into contention? How does this impact upon how we experience our bodies andour selves as professional athletes?

In a context of the mass commodification of the footballer’s body and the hyper performance of modern sport, sport

sciences have become increasingly a part of the institutional structure. Inside biomechanic laboratories and the sterile, uber private realms of professional football clubs, bodies are being ‘worked on’ in conventional and novel ways. Huizinga suggests that ‘culture arises in the form of play’. Is the play character in sport transforming in the face of new forms of scientific rationality, metric obsession and technological invasion into the body. ‘A mania for measurement … and the limitless demands of performativity’, as Shilling notes, has led to the development of the dynamometer, the sphygmograph, the pneumatometer and the ergograph.

Inspired by Mauss’s sharp eye for observation, it is a primary intention to observe how new techniques of the body in this field are changing and indeed how the physical construction of the sport has both produced but also lost forms of mimetic action. How, if at all, does this impact on the way we feel about our own bodies? Despite populist rhetoric reifying the body of elite football players to novel heights, it is rather a vulnerable body that draws me closer. The structural vulnerability of this body to politicisation, commodification, injury and above all chemical invasion and biomechanical observation poses significant questions about the ethical value of purporting such rationality into the wider cultural world signified through the athletic body. It is important to bear in mind that sport, too often forgotten in social research, is a fundamental part of life for many people and embodies a rare ‘pantomimic’ quality to inspire action and fervent belief systems. Lastly, I hope to enter a laboratory for biomechanics and come out remembering how it feels to play.

Upcoming BIOS events12 May 2011 a Bioethical approach to Human Rights?, Dr Alasdair Cochrane

Centre for the Study of Human Rights, LSE, 5-7pm Graham Wallas Room AGWR, 5th floor, Old Building.

9 June 2011 Biology and Gender Representations in alternative Families: the Case of Lesbian and Gay Co-parenting Projects, Dr Cathy Hebrand, FNRS Postdoctoral Researcher, Université Libre de Bruxelles; Visiting Fellow, BIOS.

13 May 2011 Technologies of Security: Security, Technology and Governance Post 9/11

8-10 June 2011 The Plastic Brain’ Workshop Basel, Switzerland.

28 June 2011 CSynBI Workshop on historical, social and philosophical aspects of modelling

Roundtables and Reading Groups – details see lse.ac.uk/biosDuring term time, the BIOS book group, and BIOS roundtable sessions are held regularly on Wednesdays. These moments are crucial to the academic life at BIOS, they facilitate discussion around a series of topics that are of interest to persons associated with BIOS, and allow everybody in BIOS to present their work and receive useful comments from their colleagues.

BIoS Book Group – The Book Group will be meeting twice in the Summer Term. Check the BIOS website for dates, room details and reading list.

BIoS Roundtables – BIOS roundtables are aimed at exploring shared interests in the BIOS community, and to address problems, issues, and concerns encountered. See BIOS website for dates and to sign up!

Get short, timely messages from the BIoS Centre, LSE twitter.com/LSEBIOS

cietiesBioSocietiesBioSocietiesBioSocietiesBioSocietiesBioSocieties-BioSocietiesBioSocietiesBioSocietiesBioSocietiesBioSocietiesBioSo-cietiesBioSocietiesBioSocietiesBioSocietiesBioSocietiesBioSocieties-BioSocietiesBioSocietiesBioSocietiesBioSocietiesBioSocietiesBioSoci-etiesBioSocietiesBioSocietiesBioSocietiesBioSocietiesBioSocietiesVol. 6 Issue 1

The forthcoming issue of Biosocieties is a special issue - The Global Health Complex- by an inter-disciplinary group of scholars critically examining the 21st century emergence of big pharma and big philanthropy on the global health scene. The issue comprises of six articles examining the growing role of pharmaceutical corporations and philanthropic organizations in the fight against ‘diseases of the poor’. The contributors are Linsey McGoey, Julian Reiss, Ayo Wahlberg, Jeremy A. Greene, Donald W. Light, Rebecca Warburton, Alex Broadbent, Ann H. Kelly, Uli Beisel, Paul Kadetz and Anne Pollack.

www.palgrave-journals.com/biosoc

Out now!

BIOS News Issue 18 • Summer 2011 11

Sara Tocchetti, PhD candidate

‘Without being gone, we are already no longer here’. Nicholas Gogol

On the 3rd of May, I will leave to conduct ‘field’ work, although in my case, the image of the ‘field’ as wide open space of natural land, should probably be replaced by an extended surface of roads, city blocks and other artefacts. It would be probably more appropriate to call my ‘field’ work a ‘concrete’ work.

So, on the 3rd of May I will board one of the one hundred and twenty seven routine flights that takes off from London Heathrow Airport each day. Possibly, an Airbus 380-600 again, I and the other three hundred and seventy-five passengers, as well as the aircrew, will take off from London and land in San Francisco.

Powered by General Electronic’s motors and assembled by the consortium European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company N.V. (EADS), this Airbus will be operated, at a designed cruising speed of approximately 800 km per hour, by two pilots whose ‘official’ and ‘biological’ gender could easily be predicted as being ‘male’.

Flying at the height of 11,000m (36,000 feet) and consuming 4,800 kilos of fuel per hour provided by Shell Corporation or Exxon, the motor’s optimised combustion will produce 40,921 kg of CO2 per hour. The figure would be more stunning if one multiplies it with the thirteen-hour of my flight time and the number of planes that take off from Heathrow each day.

Presumably, while on board I will have the chance to taste a sample of the USA cuisine, stored and transported in a plastic’s meal, I might as well have the opportunity to watch the latest entertainments from industry-media-finance conglomerates such as Vivendi SA, General Electrics or Walt Disney Company.

This is only brief account of a far more complex matrix of processes and events that would finally enable me to research the community I am interested in.

The methodological ‘they’, or the people that constitute the community I am interested in, widely employ the internet and networks to promote the image of their community to the other, to advertise for more participants and contributions, and to stay in touch with people with similar interests living in distant territories.

Therefore, I spent almost one year in front of my own desktop, typing, searching information about the people I am interested in, through a network of interconnected computers, cables and satellites that compose the material structure of the Internet. Thanks to the World Wide Web protocols, my eyes have been the recipient of luminous information. Without moving, ‘navigating’ through key words, I could assemble a specific type of knowledge, a specific type of representation, almost de-territorialized, a teleported impression of proximity. I could see ‘their faces’ in the pictures left on their personal websites or Flickr extensions. Read their blogs and meeting notes posted on their virtual community portals, have access to their Curriculm Vitae, trace the streets were they live on Google Map and ‘see’ their houses and meeting places.

On the 3rd of May, I will finally transpose myself. The mediatic proximity (proximité mediatique) previously gained through the technology of optic fibber will by replaced or reassembled with the one of my own body propelled at 800 km per hour, technologically cruising the linear continuity linking the point A to the point B.

Maybe coming back from a ‘field work’ only means to enter a new one, as the experience of ‘home’ and ‘everyday’ are distorted by ourselves as becoming ‘other’.

But before leaving ‘there’ and coming back ‘here’ to leave again shortly after ‘somewhere else’, may I warmly invite all of you to the protest in defence of public sector on the 26th March. ‘Think global, act local!’

*This insignificant piece of writing has nonetheless been partially inspired by the work of Paul Virilo as developed in his work entitled ‘The Speed of Liberation’ (La Vitesse de Liberation, Galilée, 1995).

BIOS • The London School

of Economics and Political

Science • Houghton Street

London WC2A 2AE

Tel: +44 (0)20 7955 6998

Fax: +44 (0)20 7955 6565

www.lse.ac.uk/collections/BIOS

12 BIOS News Issue 18 • Summer 2011

PUBLICATIONS

Herbrand C., (2011) « La filiation monosexuée en Belgique et au Québec : jeux et enjeux de parcours législatifs distincts », in Corriveau P., Daoust V. (dir.), La régulation sociale des minorités sexuelles. L’inquiétude de la différence, Québec, Presses de l’Université du Québec, 2011, p. 105-134.

*Herbrand C., (2011) « Les paradoxes de la reconnaissance légale de la pluriparentalité : analyse du projet de ‘parenté sociale’ en Belgique », Enfances, Familles et Générations, Montréal.

Jackson, E (2011) ‘Criminalising the supply of tobacco’ Health Economics, Policy and Law 1-3

Nahman, M. (2011) Extractions: Securing Borders, Trafficking Ova (Palgrave MacMillan)

Nahman, M. (2011) ‘Reverse Traffic’ and Intersecting inequalities in human ova exchanges’, Reproductive Biomedicine Online

Nahman, M. (2011) ‘Making Interferences: The Cultural Politics of Transnational Ova ‘Donation’’ in Michi Knecht et al (Eds) IVF as Global Form. University of Chicago Press.

Rose, N. (2011) Biological Citizenship and Its Forms, in E. Zhang, A. Kleinman and Weiming Tu, eds. Governance of Life in Chinese Moral Experience: The Quest for an Adequate Life, pp. 237-265, Routledge, 2011.

Rose, N. (2011) Historical Changes in Mental Health Practices, in G. Thornicroft, G. Szmukler, B. Drake and K. Muser, eds., The Oxford Textbook of Community Mental Health, pp. 9- 18, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Schmid, S. (2010) ‘Reproduktion als interpersonelle und konzeptionelle Relation. Überlegungen nach Marilyn Strathern’. In: Bettina Bock von Wülfingen, Ute Frietsch (eds.) Epistemologie und Differenz Zur Reproduktion des Wissens in den Wissenschaften. transcript, Bielefeld (correction to the lent term issue)

Tarr. J. (2011) ‘Educating with the hands: Working on the body/self in Alexander Technique’, Sociology of Health & Illness, 33(2): 252-265.

*Zhang, J. Y (2011) ‘The ‘National’ and ‘Cosmos’: The emergence of synthetic biology in China’. EMBO Reports, 12 (3)

*Zhang, J. Y. (2011) ‘Scientific institutions and effective governance: a case study of Chinese stem cell research’. New Genetics and Society. 30(2)

*Zhang, J. Y. and Arnoldi, J. (2011) ‘The dual reality in the institutionalization of the Chinese knowledge economy’, International Journal of Chinese Culture and Management. forthcoming

Publications, lectures and conference presentations by BIOS staff, associates and students

PRESENTaTIoNS

Hamilton, R.a. ‘‘Dangerous tools’ in ‘dangerous hands’: How synthetic biology is imagined as a ‘bioterrorist threat’’. Problematising Danger Workshop, King’s College London. 21-22 February 2011.

Marris, C. ‘Synthetic Biology and its Publics’ Invited plenary talk at the IOSSB Symposium, Imperial College. 10-11th November 2011.

Marris, C. ‘STS research on public attitudes and public engagement: misunderstood misunderstandings’ Invited talk: at the ‘Synthetic Biology meets STS’ meeting, University of Sheffield. 22-23rd November 2010.

*Marris, C. ‘Upstream construction of publics: the case of synthetic biology’ at the British Sociological Association Annual conference, LSE, London, 6-8th April 2011.

Rose, N. ‘Neuroscience and law – a perspective from Europe’, Second Raymond and Beverly Sackler U.S.A.-U.K. Scientific Forum, Irvine, California.

Rose, N. ‘The Human Sciences in ‘the age of biology’: revitalizing sociology’; Martin White Inaugural Lecture, London School of Economics and Political Science, March 2011.

Rose, N. ‘Living technologies – creating, marketing and living with ‘medical devices’?’ Opening Keynote to the Health Care Technology and Place (HCTP) Symposium, University of Toronto, March 2011.

Rose, N. ‘Neuro: the new brain sciences and the remaking of the human’, University of Toronto, March 2011.

Rose, N. ‘Governing conduct in the age of the brain’, University of Chicago Clinical Ethnography Workshop, March 2011.

Zhang, J. Y. ‘Staging climate change’, Invited presentation at Cosmopolitan Climate Workhop, University of Munich, 17-19 January, 2011