Now published as Lyall, C. and Fletcher, I. (2013), "Experiments in interdisciplinary capacity building: the successes and challenges of large-scale interdisciplinary investments", Science and Public Policy (2013) 40(1): 1-7

Between the 1970s and the mid-1990s the body mass index (BMI) became the standard means of assessing obesity both in populations and in individuals, replacing previously diverse and contested definitions of excess body weight. This article draws on theoretical approaches from the sociology of standards and science and technology studies to describe the development of this important new standard and the ways in which its adoption facilitated the development of obesity science, that is, knowledge about the causes, health effects and treatments of excess body weight. Using an analysis of policy and healthcare literatures, I argue that the adoption of the BMI, along with associated standard cut-off points defining overweight and obesity, was crucial in the framing of obesity as an epidemic. This is because, I suggest, these measures enabled, firstly, the creation of large data sets tracking population-level changes in average body weight, and, secondly, the construction of visual representations of these changes. The production of these two new techniques of representation made it possible for researchers in this field, and others such as policymakers, to argue credibly that obesity should be described as an epidemic.

This section focuses on the ethical, legal, social, and policy questions arising from research involving human and animal subjects.

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.

Talking STS is a collection of interviews and accompanying reflections on the origins, the present and the future of the field referred to as Science and Technology Studies or Science, Technology and Society (STS). The volume assembles the thoughts and recollections of some of the leading figures in the making of this field. The occasion for producing the collection has been the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the University of Edinburgh’s Science Studies Unit (SSU). The Unit’s place in the history of STS is consequently a recurring theme of the volume. However, the interviews assembled here have a broader purpose – to present interviewees’ situated and idiosyncratic experiences and perspectives on STS, going beyond the contributions made to it by any one individual, department or institution. Both individually and collectively, these conversations provide autobiographically informed insights on STS. Together with the reflections, they prompt further discussion, reflection and questioning about this constantly evolving field.