Bio-objects and their Boundaries: Governing Matters at the Intersection of Society, Politics, and Science

After many hours spent exploring Web sites of clinics and discussing with other patients across the globe, a Swedish couple decides the only way to treat their child’s disease is to venture to China to gain access to new stem cell therapies not available in their home country. At the same time a Swedish researcher, who is increasingly concerned by the flourishing of promissory and yet unproven stem cell therapies around the globe, joins forces with British researchers to draw on stem cell lines derived from an in vitro fertilization (IVF) embryo to explore the mechanisms of this very disease. Yet another group of British researchers tinkers with transgenic mice to achieve a similar aim (research that is co-sponsored by a US-American patient organization, but that a trans-national group of animal rights activists finds deeply worrisome). Roughly a thousand miles toward the South, an Italian woman in her early 40s makes arrangements with a fertility center to be able to draw on egg cells that had been donated by another woman, an arrangement that she makes over phone and in English with a Ukrainian fertility center as egg donation is not legally available in her home country and offered at prices that she cannot afford in countries closer to her home. Detached from these locations and spaces and yet somehow connected, policy-makers in Brussels ponder over how to integrate these various promissory objects and concerned subjects into European innovation policies, to make sure that Europe does not miss the opportunity that stem cells offer toward a knowledge-based future. These instances take place in different spaces and they involve very different subjects and objects, as well as a range of novel biological forms that cannot be easily classified along conventional categories. Yet, what might we learn if we cease to treat them as different phenomena? What might we learn from bringing these different objects together and explore their similarities and differences? And how might the knowledge generated through such a convergence enhance both our understanding of how we know and make sense of our world as well as how we approach and choose to live in it? Most importantly, they deal with the issue of “life” and raise questions about how life enters into the picture. Doctors confront such an issue routinely through their engagement with reproductive medicine and its converse, dealing with the end of life itself when managing death. But our story above suggests that “life” is entering the picture in new ways and crossing boundaries – between human and human, human and animal, the natural and unnatural, and between the very meaning of life and death. Questions of such kinds inform the recently established international research network, “Bio-objects and their Boundaries: Governing Matters at the Intersection of Society, Science and Politics,” launched in December 2010. This “Action”, funded by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) framework, comprises a very heterogeneous group of young and more experienced researchers from a variety of disciplines and fields of inquiry, ranging from science studies, philosophy, through to the life sciences, a network under the formal oversight of the co-authors (Box 1) (1). Box 1 European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) Action IS1001: “Bio-objects and their Boundaries: Governing Matters at the Intersection of Society, Politics, and Science” • This Action, a research network, is funded by COST. • It was launched in December 2010 and is scheduled to run until December 2014. • Web site: http://www.bioobjects.eu. All members engage with bio-medical and bio-technological innovation processes in their daily lives as researchers in our home institutions. For instance, some of us work with human embryonic stem cell (hESC) lines on benches in laboratories, others venture into cross-country comparisons of the regulatory settlements of hESC research, while still others follow hESCs and hESC scientists in their daily work on benches and desk tops to get a better sense of what is going on. In this Action, all of us bring our individual experiences, insights and findings, as well as questions and puzzles, in order to share them, exchange them, and to learn from this synergy. Indeed, a central tenet of this collaborative endeavor is the understanding that while discrete bio-medical and bio-technological innovation processes and their products have different effects and implications in different spaces and domains, much can be learnt if we overcome disciplinary boundaries, and try to assemble these different objects – as well as the researchers that conduct research on them or that help make them in the first place. We venture into such an endeavor through the concept of “bio-objects.”