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.

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.

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 State's should respond to medical advancement.

No abstract

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.