Our Thanks to Founding Editor Professor Nikolas Rose
As BioSocieties reaches its twentieth year we write to mark a significant transition in our history. Professor Nikolas Rose, founding editor and global leader in social studies of the life sciences, has stepped down from his active editorial role. Nikolas has provided assured navigation of both the social and the life sciences in the new millennium, guidance that makes BioSocieties the distinctive and compelling publication it is today. Nikolas will remain with the journal as our Founding Editor. On behalf of the journal and the scholarly community it strives to represent, we wish to pay tribute to his foresight in recognizing the need for a scholarly outlet such as BioSocieties.
BioSocieties emerged in the context of a constellation of biological innovations that seemed to both accelerate around the turn of the new century and to present kinds of complexity that defied the available social scientific analytic frameworks. It was conceived in the midst of hopes and fears about genomics, stem cells, ‘smart drugs,’ new reproductive technologies, and what appeared to be a full-scale molecularisation and technologisation of the process of human life. It was evident that these new biological platforms were both embedded in biopolitics – think of the contestation over embryo research for example – and presented novel conceptual dilemmas for our understandings of health and disease, of human-animal boundaries, of the nature of the economy, of gender and race and the role of the state in the regulation of life itself.
In the early 2000s, Nikolas was closely engaged with research on the new life sciences, and held key positions at several universities, where he was focused on building research capacity and creating analytic frameworks able to address these dilemmas. As Head of the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths College he convened the BIOS research network, building on his extensive work on biopolitics and governmentality to foster discussion and debate about how to understand the new life sciences using the methodological and analytical tools of critical social science. In 2003, he founded the BIOS Centre for the Study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Society at the London School of Economics and Political Science, a centre that attracted researchers from all over the world as PhD students and as academic staff, and also as visiting researchers and participants in a series of “Vital Politics” conferences. These high profile meetings catalysed excitement around the cutting edge work that then began to appear in BioSocieties.
During this period Nikolas published The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton 2006), a book which has set out an intellectually compelling ground plan for ways in which social scientists and theorists could approach the new life sciences. He would go on to publish several more key texts that opened out the life sciences in new ways and provide continuing guidance to the field: Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind (2013 with Joelle M. Abi-Rached), The Urban Brain: Mental Health in the Vital City (with Des Fitzgerald 2022) and most recently Questioning Humanity: Being Human in a Posthuman Age (with Thomas Osborne 2024).
The BIOS Centre provided the institutional platform for the creation of BioSocieties, and Nikolas worked with Professors Anne Harrington and Ilina Singh to launch the journal, in 2006. Its mandate was to move beyond then existing limits to social analysis of the life sciences and foster more rigorous, adventurous kinds of interdisciplinary analysis and forms of critique that both engaged with the technical detail of biological innovation and refused to reduce biology to social determination. In the first volume, for example, the Editor’s Introduction set out an ambitious agenda for the journal, while in the second issue, in the tremendously influential paper with Paul Rabinow “Biopower Today”, Nikolas articulated a visionary path forward for the journal at a vital configuration of intersecting fields.
At the time, existing schools of analysis tended to either focus on ethical issues, a role that was well established for the life sciences and tended to reduce analysis to a set of deliberative tests and to regulatory facilitation, or on denunciatory revelation, seeking to expose the reductionist, constructivist, essentialist, discriminatory, etc. underpinnings of life science practice. Work in science and technology studies offered a wider range of possibilities for analysis of sociotechnical topics, but STS was still focused primarily on engineering and the ‘hard’ sciences at that point, only just beginning to address biomedicine and the life sciences. The established fields of Medical Anthropology and Sociology of Medicine laid out a very particular program for the social scientist’s role in studying medicine – the illness experience, professionalization and expertise of doctors, cross-cultural comparison of disease concepts – and actively discouraged engagement with the technical detail of biological and biomedical innovation whether at the bench or the bedside. History of life science and medicine was still dominated by studies focussed on the nineteenth century and earlier.
Hence, BioSocieties sought a way beyond these familiar positions, one that entailed a productive engagement with life scientists and biotechnologists themselves, that recognised the tension between the progressive possibilities of their work in taking human life itself into our own hands, and their potential role in seeing living entities as an endless resource for manipulation and exploitation. Perhaps most strikingly, and very much in keeping with Nikolas’s arguments, the journal ethos treated biology as a domain with its own power and logics, rather than something exhaustively organised by social forces, and hence pioneered new ways to interrogate the tensions between biological and social life.
Nikolas would go on to found the Department of Social Science, Health, and Medicine – now called the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine – at King’s College London in 2012, which provided the institutional and intellectual base for the journal for many years.
Contributing authors to BioSocieties have through the past two decades empirically focused on the ways in which pharmacological, reproductive, neuroscientific and genetic research and expertise have been harnessed in the formation of bio-economies, provided ways of understanding human life and selves, all the while raising complex ethical dilemmas. It is to the social shaping and effects of biomedicine and bioscience that contributors have attended, making BioSocieties a forum that brings together anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, historians, philosophers, bioethicists, legal scholars and more. The journal has shifted with the intersections of life science and society that its contributors focus on, from an early and enduring focus on human health and biology to more recent studies turning to climate change, multi-species entanglements, food and biofuels. Yet the spirit of an interdisciplinary social science of the life sciences has been present from the beginning, and remains a guiding thread even as the configurations of knowledge, economics, technology and power shift around us and in our sites of study and analysis.
During Nikolas’ time as Senior Editor, the journal has published a total of 20 special issues with guest editors and contributors exploring how neuroscientific research, pharmacological development, genetic science, patient activism and global health interventions have been crucial elements in the assemblages that constitute the different kinds of ‘biosocieties’ that can be found in China, the United Kingdom, India, Brazil, the United States and many more countries throughout the world. Indeed, ensuring global perspectives and comparisons has been growing in importance in the journal’s mission, and attracting and supporting contributions from scholars based in different parts of the world remains a priority going forward.
As editors of BioSocieties, we are deeply indebted to Nikolas Rose’s intellectual guidance and collegiality, the imprint of which is so evident in the pages of the journal. His institutional and intellectual work continues to inform everything we do. We look forward to building on this legacy as we navigate a world where climate change, neurotechnologies, zoonoses, anti-science modes of governance, chronic diseases, ‘green’, ‘red’ and ‘blue’ biotechnology, vaccines, fertility decline, and many more issues are at the top of political agendas, continuing to require the critical social scientific attention of our community of authors.
Catherine Waldby, Ayo Wahlberg, and the BioSocieties Editorial Collective
BioSocieties
