Biomedical Research and the Politics of the Human (360G-Wellcome-212577_Z_18_Z)

The human is a primary reference point for the aims of contemporary biomedical research along with its ethical and political groundings. This project asks: what and who constitutes that human? Despite the many assumptions we may hold about what and who is human, no study has delivered fine-grained empirical research about how scientists, policymakers and regulators approach and define the human across the levels of cells, tissues, and organisms. A series of changes—in biomedicine and in the scholarship on science and society—signal that it is a crucial time to reconsider the meaning and function of the human in the life sciences. Using an inductive qualitative approach, this project offers an ambitious plan for an empirical reorientation with the human in relation to two domains of biomedicine that constitute the project’s work packages: 1) Kidney Organoids: miniature organs grown in petri dishes. 2) Interspecies Mammalian Chimera: injecting human cells into developing pig embryos Based on a theoretical framework that draws together insights from science and technology studies, sociology and legal and political studies, the project is built on detailed empirical observation of the two research domains covering four national case studies in the UK, Spain, Germany and USA.