United States Atomic Energy Commission (USAEC) and UN agencies utilized techniques of power and negotiation to implement radiation exposure regulations. USAEC affiliated scientists’ expertise was cultivated while establishing a radiation protection regime based on classified experiments. World Health Organization (WHO) leadership sought to manifest a human right to health, including a right to protection from radiation contamination. The careers of a few technical experts and interagency UN correspondence shows how American risk models of radiation regulation traveled and ultimately inhibited WHO (...) attempts to frame radiation as a public health threat. The USAEC and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) navigated WHO’s way of perceiving radiation with technical experts and bureaucratic and legislative means. This paper shows the underpinning at the UN of competing models of radiation regulation, one state centric and the other, an individual right to health. This narrative provides insights into the nature of the UN’s current conceptualization of radiation regulation and argues for further research into UN, radiation, and human rights history. (shrink)

In this article we examine the history of the production of microarray technologies and their role in constructing and operationalizing views of human genetic difference in contemporary genomics. Rather than the “turn to difference” emerging as a post-Human Genome Project phenomenon, interest in individual and group differences was a central, motivating concept in human genetics throughout the twentieth century. This interest was entwined with efforts to develop polymorphic “genetic markers” for studying human traits and diseases. We trace the technological, methodological (...) and conceptual strategies in the late twentieth century that established single nucleotide polymorphisms as key focal points for locating difference in the genome. By embedding SNPs in microarrays, researchers created a technology that they used to catalog and assess human genetic variation. In the process of making genetic markers and array-based technologies to track variation, scientists also made commitments to ways of describing, cataloging and “knowing” human genetic differences that refracted difference through a continental geographic lens. We show how difference came to matter in both senses of the term: difference was made salient to, and inscribed on, genetic matter, as a result of the decisions, assessments and choices of collaborative and hybrid research collectives in medical genomics research. (shrink)

We argue for a foundational epistemic claim and a hypothesis about the production and uses of mathematical epidemiological models, exploring the consequences for our political and socio-economic lives. First, in order to make the best use of scientific models, we need to understand why models are not truly representational of our world, but are already pitched towards various uses. Second, we need to understand the implicit power relations in numbers and models in public policy, and, thus, the implications for good (...) governance if numbers and models are used as the exclusive drivers of decision making. (shrink)