Ayo Wahlberg

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Verified

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• PhD
• Professor at University of Copenhagen

Today, in the field of hereditary colorectal cancer in Denmark, more than 40,000 identified healthy individuals with an increased risk of cancer are enrolled in a surveillance program aimed at preventing cancer from developing, with numbers still growing. What this group of healthy individuals has in common is lifelong regular interaction with a he...

By April 2020, COVID-19 lockdowns had restricted the movements of over half the world’s population. As health authorities advise people living with chronic conditions to self-isolate because they are at particular risk of serious complications and death, the epidemiological split between communicable and noncommunicable disease is tenuous. We argue...

The contemporary global health agenda has shifted emphasis from mapping disease patterns to calculating disease burden in efforts to gauge ‘the state of world health’. In this paper, we account for this shift by showing how a novel epidemiological style of thought emerged in the closing decades of the twentieth century. As is well known, the compil...

Objective Women with or at risk of hereditary breast‐ and ovarian cancer (HBOC) often live a surveillance‐focused life from young adulthood. As they navigate a life of heightened medical vigilance, or a “cancer surveillance life,” we explore how women with HBOC, as well as their partners and families, experience this particular kind of living throu...

Background Families of children and adolescents with cancer strive to maintain routines and normalcy during the child’s treatment trajectory that requires frequent hospital visits. Intravenous chemotherapy at home can reduce time spent on the frequent hospital visits and mitigate disruption in daily life. Studies on home chemotherapy for children a...

Background: Over the past three decades, complex care and treatment have increasingly become the responsibility of parents as home-based care providers, yet little is known about parents' caregiving experiences when considering the variety of care tasks. It is imperative to gain insight into the challenges parents face when managing treatment and c...

Adolescents and young adults with type 1 diabetes must manage a demanding chronic condition in their daily lives, but adequate self-management remains a major challenge. In this article, we explore the logics invoked in shaping daily type 1 diabetes self-management among adolescents and young adults and propose an analytical view of self-management...

In November 2018, a scientific scandal broke when news emerged that the world’s first gene edited babies had been born in China on the eve of the 2nd International Summit on Human Genome Editing in Hong Kong. He Jiankui had recruited a total of seven couples who were in need of fertility treatment to participate in an effort to clinically apply hum...

While unequally resourced partners from the so-called global South are often considered ‘mere sample providers’ in larger international genomics collaborations, in this paper, we show how they strategically work to mobilize their role in a global system of tissue exchange to deliver services for local communities. We unpack how a prenatal diagnosti...

With news of the birth of the world’s first babies following embryo gene editing breaking in November 2018, transhumanist aspirations to biotechnologically augment human capacities seem that much closer to reality. In this commentary, I argue that recent and ongoing biotechnological developments in reproductive and genetic science notwithstanding,...

Background Early diagnosis is crucial for the treatment of childhood cancer as it in some cases can prevent progression of disease and improve prognoses. However, childhood cancer can be difficult to diagnose and barriers to early diagnosis are multifactorial. New knowledge about factors influencing the pathway to diagnosis contribute to a deeper u...

Objective As survival rates increase, growing numbers of childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) survivors are at risk for somatic and psychosocial late effects. Adolescent and young adult (AYA) survivors represent a distinct and vulnerable group. This study aimed to explore how AYA survivors of childhood ALL experience everyday life after can...

Background With the implementation of a research project providing whole genome sequencing (WGS) to all pediatric cancer patients in Denmark (2016–2019), we sought to investigate healthcare professionals' views on WGS as it was actively being implemented in pediatric oncology. Methods Semistructured interviews were carried out with pediatric oncol...

There have been substantial advances in the diagnostics and treatment of congenital heart defects (CHDs) in recent decades, and this has improved survival significantly. Consequently, there is a growing interest in how CHDs affect the daily lives of children and youth. We examine life with CHDs as a particular kind of living from the perspectives o...

In recent years, it has become increasingly important to understand the global circulation of healthcare innovations in nations’ attempts to solve contemporary health challenges. This article is a systematic review and meta-ethnography–inspired analysis that explores the global circulation of health-related standards, protocols, procedures, and reg...

This introductory chapter provides a definition of selective reproduction, outlining the commonalities and differences between assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) and selective reproductive technologies (SRTs). The chapter offers an overview of the major forms of selective reproduction in the twenty-first century, describing their objectives,...

With an impending introduction of genome sequencing into paediatric oncology to facilitate personalised medicine, this study examines parent perspectives on participating in whole genome sequencing (WGS) research in the difficult weeks following diagnosis. As an embedded part of Sequencing Tumor and Germline DNA—Implications and National Guidelines...

The looming figures of smog-choked cities, cancer villages and contaminated food have become iconic of a modernising China: the tragic, perhaps unavoidable, side effects of a voracious economy. In this article, I examine how the sperm bank—jingzi ku—in China has emerged quite literally as a sanctuary of vitality amidst concerns around food safety,...

Germ line mutations causing paediatric cancer predisposition syndromes (PCPSs) are more common than previously anticipated and are now recognised as a significant contributor to the incidence of childhood cancer. Advances in and increased clinical application of next-generation sequencing technologies have led to a rise in paediatric patients under...

From its crude and uneasy beginnings thirty years ago, Chinese sperm banking has become a routine part of China's pervasive and restrictive reproductive complex. Today, there are sperm banks in each of China's twenty-two provinces, the biggest of which screen some three thousand to four thousand potential donors each year. Given the estimated one t...

This chapter chronicles the difficult birth of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) in China through the 1980s and 1990s, showing how ideas of improving population quality acted as a persuasive alibi for those pioneers working to develop fertility technologies under crude conditions and at a time when contraception rather than conception was a...

Once it passes quality control, donor sperm is “released” to the thousands of couples who are involuntarily childless because of azoospermia. Chapter 6 shows how for those infertile couples who “borrow” sperm in China, secrecy is as vital as male infertility is taboo. Through fertility clinics, artificial insemination by donor (AID) emerges as an o...

Smog-choked cities, cancer villages, and contaminated food have become iconic problems of a modernizing China—the tragic, perhaps unavoidable, side effects of a voracious economy. Chapter 3 examines how the sperm bank— jingziku —in China has emerged quite literally as a sanctuary of vitality amid concerns around food safety, air and water pollution...

Donor screening in sperm banks has become increasingly medicalized in the last few decades. Sperm is a vital yet potentially dangerous substance. To improve its quality, sperm banks advise potential donors on how best to prepare themselves prior to donating. To mitigate the dangers it poses, sperm banks screen would-be donors as a way to prevent tr...

From crude and uneasy beginnings, sperm banking has become a routine part of China’s pervasive and restrictive reproductive complex within the space of thirty years, albeit hampered by what some commentators have described as a “sperm crisis.” In the introduction, routinization is defined as a socio-historical process through which habituated regim...

Beyond the treatment of infertility, donor sperm is also made available to couples if the male partner is considered to suffer from a genetic disease and is deemed “not suitable for reproduction” because of a risk that the disease will be transmitted to offspring, thereby negatively affecting the quality of China’s newborn population. There are far...

Tracking the routes of routinization that sperm banking has followed in China has required showing how it came to be (1) socio-historically (re-)produced and entrenched within China’s restrictive reproductive complex; (2) an established and habituated part of health delivery, which is to say a standard of care for a given condition that is sustaine...

A limit of five women’s pregnancies per donor in China has spawned a cyclic and “high throughput” style of sperm banking, which requires getting great numbers of potential donors to show up at the sperm bank for screening. Chapter 4 argues that it is the relatively unexposed and virile vitality of bioavailable male populations on university campuse...

This book explores how conditions for childbearing are changing in the 21st century under the impact of new biomedical technologies. Selective reproductive technologies (SRTs) - technologies that aim to prevent or promote the birth of particular kinds of children – are increasingly widespread across the globe. Wahlberg and Gammeltoft bring together...

This qualitative systematic review investigated how individuals with chronic illness experience online peer-to-peer support and how their experiences influence daily life with illness. Selected studies were appraised by quality criteria focused upon research questions and study design, participant selection, methods of data collection, and methods...

In recent decades, social scientists have carried out empirical studies in the laboratories, clinics and patient associations within and through which biological knowledge, biomedical practice, biosocialities and biological citizens are being co-produced. In this chapter, I sketch a novel analytics of what we might be conceptualised as the vitality...

How can it be that China, with its history of restrictive family planning policies, is today home to some of the world’s largest IVF clinics, carrying out as many as 30,000 cycles annually? This article addresses how IVF was developed in China during the early 1980s, becoming routinized at the same time as one of the world’s most comprehensive fami...

The concepts of governmentality and biopolitics were contemporaneous and interlinked in Michel Foucault's initial analyses. These foregrounded how in the eighteenth century the population emerged as a ‘natural-cultural reality’ resulting from an integration of biological and economic knowledge. Subsequent research on biopolitics and governmentality...

In a historical perspective, selective reproduction is nothing new. Infanticide, abandonment, and selective neglect of children have a long history, and the widespread deployment of sterilization and forced abortion in the 20th century has been well documented. Yet in recent decades selective reproduction has been placed under the aegis of science...

This article examines the making of a national medicine in Vietnam. How can it be that the medical traditions in Vietnam came to be described as Vietnamese during the course of the twentieth century? In this article, I suggest that historical contingencies in Vietnam have facilitated what might be thought of as a “doctrine of combination,” somewhat...

Commentators such as Goldacre, Dawkins, and Singh and Ernst are worried that the rise in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) represents a flight from science propagated by enemies of reason. We outline what kind of problem CAM use is for these commentators, and find that users of CAM have been constituted as duped, ignorant, irrational, or...

Several years ago, both authors engaged in research into bioscience and biomedical regulation in Asian countries. One of us (BP) explored why the regulatory and discursive embedding of human embryonic stem cell research in Israel was much more permissive than elsewhere. The other author (AW) sought to understand the conditions under which tradition...

One of the features of advanced life sciences research in recent years has been its internationalisation, with countries such as China and South Korea considered 'emerging biotech' locations. As a result, cross-continental collaborations are becoming common generating moves towards ethical and legal standardisation under the rubric of 'global bioet...

Med stigende fokus på øget tværfaglighed og digitalisering i undervisningen på Københavns Universitet undersøger vi i denne artikel hvilke betingelser, der skal til, for at tværfaglighed og digitalisering rent faktisk kan omsættes til læringsudbytte? Det gør vi ved at reflektere over hvilke didaktiske komponenter, der har været virksomme i et nylig...

Asia's dramatic entry on to the global biotech scene has not gone unnoticed by commentators and social scientists. Countries like China, India, South Korea and Singapore have been identified as ‘emerging biotech powers’. Consequently scholars have begun examining the particularities of how biotechnologies (eg stem cell science, genetic testing and...

Vietnam has been described by many commentators as being about two decades “behind” many of its East Asian neighbors in terms of economic and social development, although a series of economic reforms initiated in 1986 under a banner of (renovation) are credited with closing the gap. At the same time, as has been the case in many other socialist cou...

Drawing on social science perspectives, Contested Categories presents a series of empirical studies that engage with the often shifting and day-to-day realities of life sciences categories. In doing so, it shows how such categories remain contested and dynamic, and that the boundaries they create are subject to negotiation as well as re-configurati...

Selection in reproductive medicine today relies on normative assessments of what 'good life' consists of. This paper explores the terms under which such assessments are made by focusing on three particular concepts of 'quality': quality of life, biological quality and population quality. It is suggested that the apparently conflicting hypes, hopes...

Herbal medicine has long been contrasted to modern medicine in terms of a holistic approach to healing, vitalistic theories of health and illness, and an emphasis on the body’s innate self-healing capacities. At the same time, since the early twentieth century, the cultivation, preparation and mass production of herbal medicines have become increas...

Does it work? This question lies at the very heart of the kinds of controversies that have surrounded complementary and alternative medicines (such as herbal medicine) in recent decades. In this article, I argue that medical anthropology has played a pivotal and largely overlooked role in taking the sham out of the placebo effect with important imp...

The figure of the 'miracle cure'-peddling quack pretending spectacular properties for worthless tonics is iconic. From their 19th century traveling wagon shows to their 21st century Internet spam scams, hucksters and cranks have been consistently targeted by health authorities as a danger to public health. Yet, in this paper, I argue that this is o...

BioSocieties, Volume 2, Issue 01, Mar 2007, pp 1-10 doi: 10.1017/S1745855207005017, Published online by Cambridge University Press 01 May 2007

In recent years, sociological examinations of genetics, therapeutic cloning, neuroscience and tissue engineering have suggested that ‘life itself’ is currently being transformed through technique with profound implications for the ways in which we understand and govern ourselves and others. In this paper, argue that a growing focus on frontier tech...

Herbal medicine has experienced tangible revivals in both Vietnam and the United Kingdom since the mid-20th century, as reflected in sales of herbal medicinal products, numbers of users and the availability of training opportunities for aspiring herbalists. In both countries, this revival came on the back of more or less concerted official efforts...

It is often suggested that, in the past 50 years, Vietnam has experienced a traditional medicine 'revival' that can be traced back to late President Ho Chi Minh's 1955 appeal 'to study means of uniting the effects of oriental remedies with those of Europe'. In this article, I demonstrate how traditional herbal medicine came to be recruited as an im...

Within the past 10-15 years, international development has seen a dramatic proliferation in participatory and empowering interventions seeking to help people help themselves. Common to these otherwise heterogeneous efforts is a claim not to take away peoples' initiatives and responsibilities for their own lives. Often, these types of participatory...