Amy Hinterberger’s research while affiliated with University of Washington and other places

By examining the laboratory practices behind designing and crafting organoids—miniature, three‐dimensional cellular structures that replicate organ functions—we highlight a critical shift in biomedical research. Over the past 16 years, advances in stem cell research have transitioned from generating stem cells to utilising these cells in building sophisticated organ models and bioengineered tissues. This transition represents a significant move from the ‘what’ of cell creation to the ‘how’ of constructing and interpreting three‐dimensional human models. Through ethnographic research (including observations and interviews) in Europe and North America, we explore how organoids are constructed and the underlying logic driving their development. Our analysis underscores the growing importance of these in vitro models for human health, urging a sociological examination of their ‘near human’ status. We argue that understanding the implications of this shift—particularly how it influences perceptions of human representation and diversity in biomedical research—requires critical scrutiny from sociologists of health and illness. This paper aims to address the urgent need to investigate not just the experimental challenges but also the socio‐political dimensions of using organoids as proxies for human physiology.

We investigate how changes in biotechnology are transforming the pursuit of human-specific models of disease and development. Our case study focuses on scientists who make human organoids. Organoids are stem cell-based three-dimensional multicellular living systems, made in labs, that mimic the function of human organs. Organoids create new opportunities for human health research, but we know little about how researchers understand the relationship between these model systems and the humans they are meant to represent. By analysing 25 interviews, complemented by observation and documentary research conducted in 2020–2022, we identify and discuss four themes that characterize how researcher's model humanness in organoids. For scientists, organoids are powerful tools to approximate the biology of human beings because they represent the closest thing to undertaking experiments on living humans, not previously possible. As laboratory tools, human organoids may replace the need for experimentation on animals, potentially contributing to the 3Rs of animal research (replacement, reduction, and refinement). Humanness is partly operationalized by modelling different human characteristics within organoids, such as male and female, different disease states, age, and other attributes. We find that human organoids are opening up previously closed spaces of experimentation and modelling in biomedicine. We argue that the humanness of organoid model systems are not a given but are enacted with and through a variety of scientific practices. These practices require critical attention from social scientists as the enactments of humanness being modelled in organoids have the potential to shape what and who counts as human in biomedical research.

Since the early twentieth century, the term “chimera” has been used to describe many experimental composite plants and animals. Composite animals and embryos, involving the transfer of cells from different species to make chimeras, continue to be a fundamental cornerstone of biomedical research. However, the twenty‐first century appears to be offering a new role for composite animals. Over the last fifteen to twenty years, composite animals and embryos have taken on a different form of life—an institutional life. With this institutional life, I argue, comes an opportunity to recast differences between humans and other animals and to reconsider how research on human health is governed.

What is the relationship between Brexit and biomedicine? Here we investigate the Vote Leave official campaign slogan ‘We send the EU £350 million a week. Let's fund our NHS instead’ in order to shed new light on the nationalist stakes of Brexit. We argue that the Brexit referendum campaign must be situated within biomedical policy and practice in Britain. We propose a re-thinking of Brexit through a cultural politics of heredity to capture how biomedicine is structured around genetic understandings of ancestry and health, along with the forms of racial inheritance that structure the state and its welfare system. We explore this in three domains: the NHS and health tourism, data sharing policies between the NHS and the Home Office, and the NHS as an imperially resourced public service. Looking beyond the Brexit referendum campaign, we argue for renewed sociological attention to the relationships between racism, biology, health and inheritance in British society.

Chimeric life forms constitute mergers between two or more distinct beings. This article explores the making of interspecies mammalian chimeras in biomedical research where the availability of human embryonic stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells has opened the way to radically humanize the biology of other organisms. By showing how chimeric life forms are foundational to biology, however, I loosen the compelling grip that chimeras have as liminal and monstrous. To the story of the chimera, this article replies with another story, that of the human as it is differently enacted at the levels of cells, tissues and organisms. Drawing on fieldwork conducted at a stem cell laboratory and farm animal research institute, the paper argues that meanings of the human become elusive and unknown when intertwined with chimeric life. In conclusion, the article reflects on the transforming politics of the human in biomedical research.

This chapter examines what has happened to multicultural politics in light of the molecularisation of biology. While twenty-first-century biology has given way to approaches accentuating biological flexibility and plasticity through postgenomics and epigenetics, these new understandings of biological life have arisen alongside the global proliferation of race, ancestry and nationalisms in bioscientific research. In this chapter, I suggest that we might approach these developments through the frame of molecular multiculture to illuminate how human genome science has galvanised a new cultural politics of heredity where forms of multicultural inclusion intersect with democratic politics and the marketplace in large-scale genome science projects.

Why do laws and regulations marking boundaries between humans and other animals proliferate amid widespread proclamations of the waning of the species concept and the consensus that life is a continuum? Here I consider a recent spate of new guidelines and regulations in the United Kingdom and United States that work to estrange human bodies from other animals in biomedicine. Using the idea of a bioconstitutional moment to understand how state institutions deliberate over “human–animal chimeras,” I address how nations differently establish separations between humans and other animals. New chimeric entities, containing human hereditary material, have consecrated regulatory ground and signify increased attention to fields of research that have long used interspecies mixing. Regulators and policy makers now find themselves in a curious position. On the one hand, they continue to regulate the estrangement between humans and other animals, but on the other, they support the creation of chimeric life—a form of life that draws into question the very basis of such separations.

Improving laboratory animal science and welfare requires both new scientific research and insights from research in the humanities and social sciences. Whilst scientific research provides evidence to replace, reduce and refine procedures involving laboratory animals (the '3Rs'), work in the humanities and social sciences can help understand the social, economic and cultural processes that enhance or impede humane ways of knowing and working with laboratory animals. However, communication across these disciplinary perspectives is currently limited, and they design research programmes, generate results, engage users, and seek to influence policy in different ways. To facilitate dialogue and future research at this interface, we convened an interdisciplinary group of 45 life scientists, social scientists, humanities scholars, non-governmental organisations and policy-makers to generate a collaborative research agenda. This drew on methods employed by other agenda-setting exercises in science policy, using a collaborative and deliberative approach for the identification of research priorities. Participants were recruited from across the community, invited to submit research questions and vote on their priorities. They then met at an interactive workshop in the UK, discussed all 136 questions submitted, and collectively defined the 30 most important issues for the group. The output is a collaborative future agenda for research in the humanities and social sciences on laboratory animal science and welfare. The questions indicate a demand for new research in the humanities and social sciences to inform emerging discussions and priorities on the governance and practice of laboratory animal research, including on issues around: international harmonisation, openness and public engagement, 'cultures of care', harm-benefit analysis and the future of the 3Rs. The process outlined below underlines the value of interdisciplinary exchange for improving communication across different research cultures and identifies ways of enhancing the effectiveness of future research at the interface between the humanities, social sciences, science and science policy.

Methodological Details. (DOCX)