Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series B: Statistical Methodology

Abstract This article analyses vector control methods that use microbes to fight diseases, such as dengue, Zika, or West-Nile, by infecting mosquitoes with an endosymbiotic bacterium, Wolbachia. These methods affect mosquitoes’ capacity to transmit viruses to humans, either by suppressing the whole mosquito population, or by neutralizing the pathogen in the insect itself. Drawing on fieldwork, we show how these approaches instantiate a biopolitical strategy that we describe as ‘symbiotic engineering’: technoscientific attempts to secure forms of collective life by creating a symbiotic relationship through which the biological reaches into the social and vice versa. We situate the use of Wolbachia in the history of biocontrol techniques, delineate its economic rationalities, and explore the transformation it inflicts on communal ties. We show how the aim of addressing ‘global’ disease through microbial means places symbiotic engineering in the milieu of residential areas. Scaling-up vector control requires attending to a messy intermediate space affected by climate conditions, human habits, the built environment, and chemical residues.

Abstract DIY biology, or Do-It-Yourself biology, refers to a movement where individuals and communities establish laboratories outside traditional academic and industrial settings—such as in garages, kitchens, or community spaces. DIY biologists experiment with gene-editing technologies like CRISPR, cultivate glow-in-the-dark plants, and engineering colorful fungi. This practice challenges established norms in research, advocating for decentralized and community-driven approaches to scientific inquiry and innovation. DIY biologists are often trained scientists who choose to conduct their research in community or home laboratories. The DIY biology movement highlights that science’s boundaries are flexible and sometimes ambiguous (Gieryn in Am Sociol Rev 48:781–795, 1983). By operating outside traditional research institutions, DIY biologists challenge established authority, hierarchies, funding structures, and proprietary regimes. They create a distinct identity beyond the increasingly neoliberalized institutional spheres of modern knowledge production, showcasing alternative ways to pursue science. I theorize DIY biology as ‘extra-institutional science’ due to its emergence outside conventional laboratories of industry and academia. This research draws on empirical data from interviews with DIY biologists and the 2021 DIY Biology Community Survey.

AbstractResearch on reproductive citizenship has focused on prospective or intended parents and how they are (or are not) accorded responsibility, entitlement and support in creating a family. With third-party reproductive arrangements, reproductive tissue donors and surrogates have emerged as new reproductive citizens to be governed in public policy, law and medical practices. In this article, drawing on 23 in-depth interviews of Finnish egg donors, we show how the donors take on roles characterised by contradictory moral responsibilities. The donors both downplay and acknowledge the significance of genetic connection to the donor children. By paying attention to selective reproductive technologies used to screen out gamete donors perceived as unfit to donate, we will discuss egg donation as a form of ableist reproductive-biological citizenship where 'good' citizens must know and care not only for their and their offspring’s health but also for the implications of their genome for someone else’s family. However, not all donors align with the ideal type of a good and able reproductive citizen. Some challenge this ideal, crafting reproductive capability and kin relations for third-party reproductive citizens in ways that diverge from the prevailing civic norms.

AbstractThis article explores how advances in synthetic biology and genetic engineering transform the relationship between life and death under contemporary biocapitalism. Discussing two cases of synthetically produced mosquitoes designed to combat vector-borne diseases by targeting their own species, the article contends that these organisms function not only as (lively) commodities but also as metabolically working bodies. These mosquitoes, as the article shows, engage in a specific form of labor, termed ‘metabolic death work,’ which aims at the eradication of fellow members of their species, thereby generating a unique form of value, introduced as ‘necrovalue.’ Complementing the notion of ‘biovalue,’ the concept of necrovalue highlights how death is reimagined as a site of value production in molecular biology and beyond. By applying these concepts to the analysis of the two cases of synthetically produced organisms, this article shows how death enters the realm of the political economy in novel ways as capital gains full control over the metabolic and reproductive capacities of engineered life forms.

AbstractThe relative expansion of biosocial research within the life sciences has generated substantial interest from social sciences, with epigenetic science and scientists the primary target of critical commentary. This has led to a narrow perspective on what the biosocial is and how it is being (re)constituted within scientific research, highlighting a need to engage diverse publics in this unfolding terrain of knowledge making. Whilst birth cohorts are often a central resource and primary context for emerging fields of biosocial and epigenetic research, how cohort participants perceive and understand ‘biosocial’ interactions in the context of their lifelong and intergenerational participation is less well known. Drawing on pilot study research with birth cohort participants in the UK and Brazil, we comparatively examine how, in the absence of explicit references to a biosocial exemplar of epigenetics, biosocial dynamics are nonetheless understood by participants in relation to (i) embodied experiences, (ii) intergenerational participation, and (iii) understandings of the knowledge the studies aim to produce. Attending to different understandings of biological and social dynamics in diverse publics helps diversify and broaden the conceptual and methodological tools used to engage in and understand what the biosocial is and how it is coming into being.

This collection of articles describes how cryopreservation enables particular imaginaries about ‘suspending time’ thereby creating what Lemke terms “a principle of whenever.” These imaginaries come to shape both intimate personal choices relating to fertility, organizational and commercial investments, research and regulatory investments in equipment and risk assessments, as well as major societal prioritizations of ecological conservation. Taken together, these articles thus unfold how mundane freezing technologies interact with profound societal changes and impact everyday lives. The politics of suspension almost seems to circumvent the political or substitute the political with ‘cooling,’ and yet these articles illustrate how these dynamics do not erase politics, but call for new analytical awareness to identify the political stakes. Taken collectively, the articles also illustrate inspiring approaches to three productive tensions running through much scholarship in Science and Technology Studies (STS)—tensions between technological and social determinism; technology optimism and pessimism; and between a focus on micro- and macro-practices. In doing so, the articles can be said in various ways to do the important work of a gestalt switch: shifting our attention from the well-known politics in the foreground to the tacit politics in the background. With this commentary, I suggest that the dynamics they explore can be productively viewed as instances of the ‘infrastructuring’ of the futures available.

AbstractThe collection and freezing of plant seeds in gene banks has been an integral part of global biodiversity policy since the early twentieth century. In recent years, the use of cryopreservation technologies (the storage of biological material at temperatures as low as −196 °C) has been advocated as a complement to these strategies. This technology promises that it will be possible to freeze significantly more plant varieties for longer periods of time. The article draws on scientific publications to analyze the current discourse on cryopreservation technology in the field of agricultural plant conservation. It underpins and intensifies biopolitical trajectories that have been inherent in ex situ conservation from the outset. First, cryotechnology submits to a pure line ontology which frames living beings as having an intrinsic genetic identity, and aims to secure this genetic identity against unplanned changes. Second, cryopreservation is linked to an imaginary of ecological separation that implies the idea that biodiversity can ultimately be preserved without a habitat. The article concludes by pointing to the material limitations and unsolved problems cryotechnologies inevitably face.

AbstractThis ethnographic project explores how inherent discursive and social tensions are expressed and worked out within obesity care at a weight-loss surgical (WLS) clinic. First, complicated doctor and patient encounters occur because WLS follows a medical logic of intervention and is presented as a “biomagical” procedure that miraculously alters the body. Surgeons, however, explain that the surgery’s success depends on patients’ long and hard work. Second, the clinic’s interdisciplinary approach adds more complexity. While expanding the scope of treatment, it blurs the division of labor among professionals and the distinction between body and mind. It also diffuses the responsibility for patients’ lifestyles and recovery among professionals. Third, alongside notions about patients’ autonomy and free choice, their wishes and bodies are constantly channeled, problematized, and negotiated with various family and peer support. While crucial for the surgery’s success, such interconnectedness raises questions about how decision making and social pressures affect the patients’ journey. Thus, WLS is refracted among webs of multiple actors and contradictory perspectives. This complexity invites a reflection on how such tensions and paradoxes destabilize medical power in modifying the body, challenge personal responsibility assumptions, and impact the quality of care.

AbstractLike other technologies, vaccines are socially shaped by socio-economic, political and organisational factors. Property rights, value capture strategies and public innovation policies guide research teams in the biochemical design of vaccines, with inevitable consequences for their price and accessibility. The Covid-19 pandemic provided an opportunity to analyse this institutional shaping process and its consequences for global public health from a political economy perspective. Indeed, the same type of invention, a recombinant protein vaccine, was simultaneously and originally developed in the US and Cuban biopharmaceutical industries and in the field of philanthropic Open Innovation. The article shows, through empirical research that collected direct testimony from scientists and privileged observers of the vaccine development fields, how certain norms and values characteristic of the US industry (financialization, assetization and de-risk) created a path dependency in the use of proprietary and experimental biotechnologies that made the US vaccine Nuvaxovid more expensive and complex to produce, but no more effective and safe than Abdala, Soberana 02 and Corbevax. In addition, the institutional constraints of the US biopharmaceutical industry on radical innovation, even within a mature biotechnology platform such as protein vaccines, would have resulted in a competitive disadvantage for Nuvaxovid, which was as expensive as an mRNA vaccine but less rapid to market and less reliable in delivery. The case of protein vaccines against Covid-19 thus shows how the institutional architectures of techno-scientific capitalism create not only inequalities but also inefficiencies, and that an innovation path with excellent results is possible even in competition where the market is not the dominant order of worth.

AbstractThe sciences of environmental epigenetics and the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease have become central in efforts to understand how early life experiences impact health across the life course. This paper draws on interviews with epigenetic scientists and laboratory observations in the United States and Canada to show how scientists conceptualize epigenetic biomarkers as molecular vestiges of early life and the consequences this has for postgenomic approaches to health, risk, and intervention. We argue that this process demarcates early life as the optimal time to study and intervene in health and positions biomarkers as conceptual and methodological tools that scientists mobilize to reimagine early life environments. These environments include Positive Childhood Experiences (PCEs), which reflect an emergent and increasingly prominent epistemic object in behavioral epigenetics. Though distinct from widespread research on Early Life Adversity, we show how PCEs continue to essentialize experience in gendered and individualized ways. Further, this paper suggests that focusing on biomarkers as molecular vestiges of early life allows scientists to create stability despite ongoing epistemological and biological unknowns in epigenetics and DOHaD. Our findings contribute new perspectives to social studies of epigenetics, biomarkers, and the production of novel epistemic objects in postgenomic knowledge practices.

AbstractThe article brings together two disparate and so far largely disconnected bodies of research: the critical analysis of cryopreservation technologies and the debate on modes of anticipation. It starts with a short review of the state of the research on the concept of cryopolitics. In the next part I will suggest two revisions. I will problematize the idea of latent life and the focus on potentialities that have been central to the research on cryopolitics so far, proposing to shift the analytic frame to suspended life on the one hand and to modes of anticipation on the other. I argue that cryopreservation practices are part of contemporary technologies of anticipation. They are linked to a politics of suspension by mobilizing a liminal biological state in which frozen organisms or biological material are neither fully alive nor ultimately dead. This seeks to avert and/or enable distinctive futures by extending temporal horizons and keeping vital processes in limbo.