Value Practices in the Life Sciences and Medicine

by Dussauge, Isabelle; Helgesson, Claes-Fredrik; Lee, Francis

• ISBN13: 9780199689583
• ISBN10: 019968958X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2015-03-29
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Author Biography

Isabelle Dussauge, Researcher, Center for Gender Research, University of Uppsala,Claes-Fredrik Helgesson, Professor, Department of Thematic Studies - Technology and Social Change, Linkoping University,Francis Lee, Assistant Professor, Department of Thematic Studies - Technology and social change, Linkoping University

Isabelle Dussauge is a researcher at the Center for Gender Research at the University of Uppsala. Her primary research interests are in the science and politics of the body, at the intersection of science and technology studies, gender studies, and the history of medicine. She has worked with visualization in medicine; the early computerization of health care; and the place of the brain in contemporary culture. She is currently concluding the research project entitled "Brain Desires", a critical inquiry into the contemporary neurosciences of sexuality and pleasure.


Claes-Fredrik Helgesson is professor in Technology and Social Change at Linkoping University, Sweden. His research interest concerns the intertwining of economic organising, science and technology. The theoretical inspiration comes primarily from economic sociology and social studies of science and technology (STS). His current project "Trials of Value" together with Francis Lee, investigates the designing of controlled medical experiments as a site where scientific, medical and economic values at play when establishing what knowledge is worth pursuing. Helgesson is co-founder and co-editor of Valuation Studies, a new open access journal, which published its first issue in spring 2013.


Francis Lee is assistant professor at the Department of Thematic Studies - Technology and Social Change at Linko?ping University, Sweden. His primary research interests are in the practices, politics and technologies of knowledge. His work has dealt with the valuation of knowledge in the biosciences, epistemic standards in education, and exclusion in sociotechnical processes. He is currently studying research design as a valuation of biomedical knowledge in the project "Trials of Value" with C-F Helgesson.

Table of Contents

1. On the Omnipresence, Diversity, and Elusiveness of Values in the Life Sciences and Medicine, Isabelle Dussauge, Claes-Fredrik Helgesson, Francis Lee, and Steve Woolgar
Part I: Conflicted "Public" Values
2. Key Opinion Leaders: Valuing Independence and Conflict of Interest in the Medical Sciences, Sergio Sismondo
3. The Moral Economy of a Miracle Drug: On Exchange Relationships Between Medical Science and the Pharmaceutical Industry in the 1940s, Christer Nordlund
4. The Third Manuscript: Rules of Conduct and the Fact-Value Distinction in Mid-20th Century Biochemistry, Sven Widmalm
Part II: Markets as Carers for Health
5. A Moral Economy of Transplantation: Competing Regimes of Value in the Allocation of Transplant Organs, Philip Roscoe
6. Critical Composition of Public Values: On the Enactment and Disarticulation of What Counts in Healthcare Markets, Teun Zuiderent-Jerak, Kor Grit and Tom van der Grinten
7. The Mosquito Multiple: Malaria and Market-Based Initiatives, Daniel Neyland and Elena Simakova
Part III: Valuing Human and Non-Human Bodies
8. Genetic Value: The Moral Economies of Cloning in the Zoo, Carrie Friese
9. Enacting Values from the Sea: On Innovation Devices, Value Practices and the Co-Modifications of Markets and Bodies in Aquaculture, Kristin Asdal
10. Norms, Values And Constraints: The Case of Prenatal Diagnosis, Ilana Lowy
Part IV: Valuations and Knowledge
11. On Relational Work and Epistemic Value in the Biomedical Science, Francis Lee
12. Data Transfer, Values and the Holding Together of Clinical Registry Networks, Claes-Fredrik Helgesson and Linus Johansson Krafve
13. Valuation Machines: Economies of Desire/Pleasure in Contemporary Neuroscience, Isabelle Dussauge
14. Valuography: Studying the Making of Values, Isabelle Dussauge, Claes-Fredrik Helgesson, and Francis Lee