Aditya Bharadwaj

“Public” perceptions of gamete donation: a research review

This paper reviews the literature on “public” perceptions of the practice of gamete (egg and sperm) donation in the treatment of infertility. Despite regular “consultation” exercises in the UK on the manner in which infertility treatments should be regulated, there is little sense of how a range of public groups respond to developments in this area. The key themes from thirty-three articles, chapters and reports are discussed. The review reveals the limited nature of our current knowledge of public understandings of and attitudes towards gamete donation as a form of infertility treatment which has been readily available and widely practiced for many years. The review is critical of the methodological and epistemological basis of much of the work in this area and argues that there is a strong case for social scientific research to attempt to capture the perceptions of a wider range of people who are rarely included in formal public consultations and often similarly excluded from research studies.

Experimental Subjectification:The Pursuit of Human Embryonic Stem Cells in India

Drawing on Foucaults notion of subject formation or subjectification, this article shows how a process of experimental subjectification, a wilful submission and participation in seemingly experimental treatments, produces both empowering and life-affirming experiences as well as a critique of established scientific norms and practices. The article examines processes of experimental subjectification in the narratives of patients pursuing clinical application of human embryonic stem cells in India to treat chronic spinal cord injury and in the narrative of the director of the clinic providing the treatment. The article addresses how the clinics director and patients from around the globe continue to successfully pursue embryonic stem cell therapies, despite intense media speculation and scientific scrutiny labelling the clinic as a maverick experimental site.

Subaltern biology? Local biologies, Indian odysseys, and the pursuit of human embryonic stem cell therapies.

As an emerging life form, stem cells are viewed as global biological entities. This extends Margaret Locks categorization of local biological or local biologies as emerging from debates about menopause, brain death, and organ transplant. I seek to reconceptualize the local, shape-shifting nature of the biological form and the ontological mutations as inherently subaltern. I draw on a multisited ethnography and a spectrum of global publics from more than 22 countries in search of contentious human embryonic stem cell therapies (hESC) in India. In so doing, I show that the subaltern local biological experience seldom finds utterance and acknowledgement in the face of hegemonic, universalized, epistemic discourse on human body and biological form.

The Genetic Iceberg: Risk and Uncertainty

New genetic technologies make it possible to screen populations in order to identify individuals’ risks or susceptibilities to specific medical conditions. On the basis of such population screening, otherwise healthy, symptomless people can be placed in the medically ambiguous position of being at risk. Equally, individuals may be tested on the basis of a family history that suggests a risk of an inherited condition. The identification of risk is probabilistic: it rests on the allocation of risk values. These are, in part, dependent on current understanding of the relationship between a given genetic make-up (the genotype) and its manifestation in physical characteristics or medical conditions (the phenotype). These are not always established with any degree of certainty and on the basis of genetic testing and family history, individuals may be identified as having high, moderate or low risks, and more specific values attached in percentage terms. Indeed, levels of risk assessment can appear to be arbitrary and moveable depending on how clinics choose to set the boundaries between, say, ‘high’ and ‘moderate’ risks. In some clinical contexts, such allocations to categories of risk are contingent upon organizational decisions and constraints concerning the allocation of resources.

Biocrossing Heterotopia: Revisiting Contemporary Stem Cell Research and Therapy in India

The fraught and contested terrain of stem cell research and therapies is an undulating landscape of utopias and dystopias. Extending the tropic notion of ‘biocrossing’ (Bharadwaj 2008), the chapter articulates the faint traces of utopic and dystopic logics underscoring these ‘crossings’ and the evolving biography of a contested terrain this (re)scripts. The chapter engages with ethnographic immersion into the lives of physicians, researchers, policymakers, and patients to conceptualize evolving scenarios that remain divergent and yet the source of emergent but shifting utopias and dystopias that often get experienced as a heterotopia.

Stem Cell Intersections: Perspectives and Experiences

The book explores personal and professional multidisciplinary perspectives on stem cell research and clinical application. The collection is organized around three interconnected parts: (1) regenerating ethics, (2) therapeutic horizons, and (3) patient positions. Taken together they provide a robust account of the contentious development of stem cell technologies around the globe with a specific focus on India as an important context in the face of significant global developments in the field. Each chapter explores the intersectional complexities that offer stem cell research and therapies a unique edge. The book seeks to explain how stem cells are accommodated, contested, and used in contemporary India and around the globe through an informed unpacking of issues underpinning contestation and promotion bestriding these technological developments.

On the Everyday Ethics of Stem Cell Therapies in India

This chapter draws on fieldwork undertaken in India on stem cells. The regulatory and bioethical guidance framework in India, like the science driving stem cell innovations and their therapeutic application, is in a state of continuous evolution. While some scholarship has critiqued this moment as a regulatory vacuum, we suggest that this liminal moment of tension between the state, science, and the everyday might be used to imagine a better, more inclusive bioethical framework. The examination of the everyday complexities of doing stem cell research and therapies in India may allow us to imagine a new bioethics—one that is cognisant of its Western genealogy, but also accounts for how biomedicine and biotechnologies are lived, experienced, and engaged with in diverse global spaces.

The Indian IVF saga: a contested history

The politics of conception in India can be traced back to the birth of the world’s first test-tube baby in 1978. This article focuses on an incident where scientists and clinicians were involved in a heated contest over ascription of intellectual credit for the birth of the first test-tube baby in India. It traces the controversy surrounding claims and counter-claims within the medical domain that appear to have emerged as a corollary to the rapid expansion of assisted conception in India. The article emphasizes the fact that this contentious issue played out largely in the media and shows that the generation of scientific credibility and reward is produced and ascribed both inside and outside the scientific domain. In so doing the article offers a glimpse into the unique ability of cultural activity to shape and recast the perception of science and scientific outcomes.