ABSTRACT
Whether hazards or promises are highlighted, there is nonetheless broad agreement that bioscience and biotechnology are impacting on human lives, and in the process, generating new forms of knowledge, subjectivity, capital and value. While 'life' is certainly not something exclusive to humanity, the chapters in this book do exclusively examine categories of human life. However technologized, molecular, detached, numerical or laboratory-based life sciences are today, when human life is the object it seems 'depersonalization' is never complete. As noted earlier, the study of practices or 'ways of doing' has been a valuable approach when analysing the work of categorization in the life sciences field. Just as the social sciences operate through methodological conventions and 'epistemic communities' so too do the life sciences and biomedical practices, and as the chapters in this collection show, methodological innovation, conceptual development and 'discovery' are organized by categories which can become destabilized or reconfigured in the process.
