Samuel Taylor-Alexander

Bioprophecy and the politics of the present: Notes on the establishment of Mexico's national genomics institute (INMEGEN)

In 1999, a small group of genomic entrepreneurs and local politicians started mobilizing the idea of founding a national genomics institute in Mexico. Approximately four years later, and after 18 months of congressional debate, the Mexican National Institute of Genomic Medicine (INMEGEN) was established by presidential decree. As scholars, we are interested in how the call for a high-tech, high-cost genomics institute was able to gain political traction in a country, where many people struggle to secure access to even the most basic level of health care. Those behind the establishment of the INMEGEN used what we call technologies of bioprophecy to present it as a modernizing institution that would move the nation into the “new world order” by bringing not only biological and economic health, but also scientific prestige to Mexico.

Bioethics in the Making: “Ideal Patients” and the Beginnings of Face Transplant Surgery in Mexico

Medical teams around the world are increasingly gaining ethical clearance to utilise face transplant surgery as a reconstructive surgical procedure. Analysis of the beginnings of the operation in Mexico vis-à-vis the early uptake of the procedure in France reveals that this controversial experimental medical field has become loaded with national significance. The primary issue of dispute has been the dependence on life-threatening immunosuppressant therapy in a procedure that treats otherwise biologically healthy people. Attempts to resolve related debate has resulted in the emergence of what my interlocutors refer to as an “ideal patient”, a person whose particular state of health and suffering render them operable within the current biomedical constraints. Drawing together the idiom of coproduction with the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries shows how this imagined patient category was refracted and stabilised as it entered into the Mexican context whilst producing patients and surgical experts as particular types of bioethical subjects. The flexibility and normative value of the “ideal patient” mobilises and is mobilised by surgeons, who themselves emerge as national bioethical subjects responsible for saving the face of nations in the midst of broader changes surrounding how States should respond to medical advancement.

Reconfiguring Social Value in Health Research Through the Lens of Liminality

Abstract Despite the growing importance of ‘social value’ as a central feature of research ethics, the term remains both conceptually vague and to a certain extent operationally rigid. And yet, perhaps because the rhetorical appeal of social value appears immediate and self‐evident, the concept has not been put to rigorous investigation in terms of its definition, strength, function, and scope. In this article, we discuss how the anthropological concept of liminality can illuminate social value and differentiate and reconfigure its variegated approaches. Employing liminality as a heuristic encourages a reassessment of how we understand the mobilization of ‘social value’ in bioethics. We argue that social value as seen through the lens of liminality can provide greater clarity of its function and scope for health research. Building on calls to understand social value as a dynamic, rather than a static, concept, we emphasize the need to appraise social value iteratively throughout the entire research as something that transforms over multiple times and across multiple spaces occupied by a range of actors.

Beyond regulatory compression: Confronting the liminal spaces of health research regulation

ABSTRACT Biomedicine and the life sciences continuously rearrange the relationship between culture and biology. In consequence, we increasingly look for a suitable regulatory response to reduce perceived uncertainty and instability. This article examines the full implications of this ‘regulatory turn’ by drawing on the anthropological concept of liminality. We offer the term ‘regulatory compression’ to characterise the effects of extant regulatory approaches on health research practices. With its focus on transformation and the ‘in-between’, liminality allows us to see how regulatory frameworks rely on a silo-based approach to classifying and regulating research objects such that they: (1) limit the flexibility necessary in clinical and laboratory research; (2) result in the emergence of unregulated spaces that lie between the bounded regulatory spheres; and (3) curtail modes of public participation in the health research enterprise. We suggest there is a need to develop the notion of ‘processual regulation’, a novel framework that requires a temporal-spatial examination of regulatory spaces and practices as these are experienced by all actors, including the relationship of actors with the objects of regulation.

Gene editing: Advising advice.

Comment on “Extreme electric fields power catalysis in the active site of ketosteroid isomerase” Aditya Natarajan, Filip Yabukarski, Vandana Lamba, Jason P. Schwans, Fanny Sunden, Daniel

‘Beauty Shouldn’t Co

ABSTRACT This essay offers an analysis of plastic surgery in Mexico viewed through the lens of Latin American bodily ontology, national aspirations toward modernity and the public health campaign ‘Que la belleza no te cue

t Your Life’: Plastic Surgery, Modernity and a Mexican Public Health Campaign

te la vida’, beauty shouldn’t co

Elberte v. Latvia: Whose tissue is it anyway – Relational autonomy or the autonomy of relations?

t your life. Supplementing ethnographic observation with analysis of news media, academic publications and the workings of the public health campaign, I write about the dangers emerging alongside the making of human beauty as something obtainable by all. These are dangers to citizens, to the profession of plastic surgery and to the institution of the Mexican nation-state. In turn, bureaucrats and their surgical colleagues harvest these dangers and the horrors they produce in order to solidify their own legitimacy and the health of cosmetic consumers cum patients-in-waiting. The aesthetics of terror deployed as part of the health campaign seeks to produce a disciplined dismodern public while reifying the legitimacy of the Mexican nation-state and a deleterious medical field. While plastic surgery provides a potential avenue for citizenship and democracy, the Mexican citizen must act responsibly and becomes the site of control because bad medical consumption threatens the country’s move toward modernity.

Normal/modern:: Reconstructive surgery in a Mexican public hospital

A European Court of Human Rights decision rendered in January 2015 (Elberte v. Latvia) has raised a curious question regarding the nature and scope of the right for relatives to consent to or to oppose the removal of a deceased person’s tissues. The decision suggests that Council of Europe member states must clearly define the scope of the right for relatives to express their preferences for removal of a deceased’s tissue or organs – provided such a right has been created in law – and member states must define the corresponding obligation or margin of discretion conferred on experts or other authorities to explain these rights to the relatives. Notwithstanding, this article asks whether the decision could open the door to a free-standing right for relatives to oppose removal of their deceased relative’s tissues or organs, regardless of the deceased person’s own wishes, in the name of the relatives’ human ‘right to respect for private life’.

Unmaking Responsibility: Patient Death and Face Transplantation

ABSTRACT A growing corpus of anthropological scholarship demonstrates how science and medicine in Mexico are imbued by national concerns with modernization. Drawing on ethnographic research in a public hospital located in the south of Mexico City, I unpack one manifestation of this dynamic, which is the conjugation of the normal and the modern in Mexican reconstructive surgery. The aspiration toward normality underlies everyday clinic practices and relationships in this field, including why parents want surgery for their children and how doctors see their patients and their responsibilities toward them. It is also central to the professional ethic of reconstructive surgeons. I argue that the realities of health care provision in Mexico coalesced with this ethic to produce reconstructive surgeons as political subjects. They aimed to modernize craniofacial surgery in Mexico and so make the bodies of craniofacial patients normal.