This article compares the treatment of living beings (unvaccinated chickens and infected cells) considered as sentinel devices in a farm and in a lab in Hong Kong. Sentinel devices are defined as living beings posted on a boundary from which they send signals of invisible threats. The ethnography looks at how they transform differences between ordinary lives and lives exposed, between good death and bad death, through the practices of those who feed them. In farms and labs exposed to Avian Influenza viruses, the logic of biosecurity intersects with a logic of care, blurring the distinction between self and other, friend and enemy through aesthetic judgments concerning what is a ‘good death’. Metabolism and immunity are redefined when sentinels are fed to produce clear signals of the mutations of viruses.

The article seeks to develop an account of the transformation of hunger and the structural violence of Apartheid into biopolitical concerns in South Africa from 1994 to 2010. I argue that the post-Apartheid politics of hunger and nutrition make no sense in South Africa outside of the politics of HIV, and that those histories of hunger and malnutrition have been radically transformed during this period such that it is now not possible to think about nutrition beyond or apart from biomedicalised knowledge of nutrition, immune system functioning and the gut. I show that the gastrointestinal tract has emerged as a central object of concern for the making of credible scientific advances, and at the same time for articulating the symbolic importance of the belly in the development of a biopolitical concern with food, nutrition and HIV. By focusing on one locale in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, in which hunger, diet, nutrition and food are conjoined with immune system functioning, treatment regimes and bodily capacity, the article parses out the matters of concern that have produced nutrition, the immune system and the gut as specific nodes of action and enquiry within the particularities of post-Apartheid, ‘epidemic’ South Africa.

This article is about food safety and food adulteration in urban India. Situated at the relational interface of foods and their contaminants, it considers ways of thinking and acting at the porous boundaries between bodies and environments. The article details how people attempt to detect where food and its adulteration begins and ends, through ethnographic reflection on several events of adulteration in Mumbai and a context of changing food safety policies in India. The article develops the concept of reliability as a lens onto food politics different than one delimited strictly in terms of consumerism. Reliability refracts the politics of difference at work in times of toxic food environments, in contemporary India and elsewhere, wherein tensions between poison and nourishment take on renewed charges. This framework recasts a choice-focused approach to thinking about food safety by centralizing how living with harm – rather than ridding the world of it, element by element – is what is at stake.

Synthetic biology enthusiasts often tout the emerging field for its present and future potential to revolutionize the life sciences. In the biosecurity arena, which has received considerable government and non-government attention, many are concerned that synthetic biology may prove to be an easier and cheaper way to conduct bioterrorism. To evaluate these claims, this article will focus on contrasting two different frameworks that have been used for understanding the development, diffusion and adoption of synthetic biology. In contrasting these frameworks, I will draw on examples from biotechnology and information technology because they are often used as analogies in synthetic biology discussions. I conclude that the critical elements for successful development, transfer, and use of synthetic biology methodologies and tools for harm are not purely material or technical, but involve important social dimensions that underpin technical work, requiring time, teams of experts, appropriate political, legal, and funding structures, and the development of new (still unknown) techno-organizational processes. To date, there have been few studies that have explored these socio-technical mechanisms of synthetic biology diffusion through in-depth examination at a micro and macro level. However, by having a more nuanced understanding of various synthetic biology approaches and how they are (or are not) able to travel easily to new settings, one can create a more refined spectrum of factors shaping threats from state and non-state actors related to synthetic biology. This article ends by outlining new research agendas important to support and pursue in order to improve biosecurity policymaking.

This article argues that the impact of genetics on psychiatry, and on our understanding of human difference more generally, will be mediated by the threefold social role of diagnostic categories as (i) coordinating devices; (ii) identities; (iii) sites of looping processes. This argument is explored by examining the intersection of a rare genetic disorder – 22q13 Deletion/Phelan-McDermid Syndrome (PMS) – with the much broader but genetically heterogeneous category of autism. We show that a ‘genomically designated’ classification such as PMS thrives as an object of research and social mobilization by virtue of its capacity to interface with, rather than supplant, the existing psychiatric diagnosis of autism. Autism genetics thus functions as a ‘trading zone’ (Galison, 1997) that allows for the exchange of knowledge, biomedical objects and resources despite incommensurable ends and frameworks of understanding.

This article investigates how the engagement of patients’ organisations (POs) in research relates to the dynamics of their activism in the area of rare diseases. It traces back how certain concerned families and groups elaborated rareness as an issue of equity and social justice, gave shape to what we call a ‘politics of numbers’ for stating the fact of rare diseases as a major public health problem, and promoted patients’ critical involvement in biomedical and therapeutic research as a solution for mainstreaming rare diseases in regular health systems. It then studies three Portuguese and three French POs, which point to the limits of the epidemiological notion of rareness for capturing the compounded and intersecting nature of the bio-psycho-social make-up of their conditions. It finally shows how these critics progressively lead to the emergence of an alternative politics, which we call a ‘politics of singularisation’. At the core of this politics stands a collective and ongoing profiling of conditions and patients, whose similarities and differences relates to the ubiquity of biological pathways and diseases categories. Our contention is that this ‘politics of singularisation’ not only pictures a politics of illnesses which questions the rationale for nosological classifications, but also, and consequently, affects the making of social links by suggesting the simultaneous identification of individual patients and constitution of collectives to which they partake while asserting their specificities.