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Moderne Geschossbauten erfordern ganzheitliche und nachhaltige Gebäudekonzepte, die ein hohes Maß an Nutzungsflexibilität und Multifunktionalität bieten und somit die Bauwerkslebensdauer und ‐wirtschaftlichkeit erhöhen. Dabei spielen die Geschossdecken eine große Rolle. In diesem Beitrag wird die Entwicklung eines innovativen Verbunddeckensystems dargestellt, das sich durch große Spannweiten sowie optimierte bauphysikalische und brandschutztechnische Eigenschaften auszeichnet und zudem die vollständige Integration gebäudetechnischer Anlagen mit zugehöriger Installationsführung in die Tragkonstruktion ermöglicht. Im Vorfeld des vorgestellten Forschungsprojektes wurde bereits ein Evaluierungsprozess von Verbunddeckensystemen durchgeführt [1].Integrated and sustainability‐oriented ceilings in steel and composite. Modern multi‐storey buildings require holistic and sustainable building conceptions to ensure a high degree of flexibility of use and multi‐functionality and augment the economic structure life. In this paper, the development of an innovative composite floor system is outlined, which is characterized by large spans and improved physical and fire protection properties and also allows complete integration of HVACR installations in the supporting structure. In the run‐up of the proposed research project an evaluation process of composite floor systems has been conducted [1].

Our analysis shows how public health genomics gets constituted differently in different countries and, moreover, produces particular patterns of inclusion and exclusion from care. These patterns indicate a paradox in public health genomics, which consists of an inverse relationship between the use of advanced molecular genetic testing technologies and the number and variety of individuals at risk included in the target population. This paradox presents a challenge for professionals and policy makers in public health genomics.

In recent years, preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) has developed into a routine diagnostic procedure in health care. Although during this process, several initiatives have been employed to regulate the procedure, access to PGD may be hampered by the diversity in health-care arrangements or therapeutic cultures in different countries. This article demonstrates how PGD provision practices depend on much more than regulation alone, by providing an in-depth comparative analysis of the provision of PGD in Britain, the Netherlands and Germany. In analysing regulation, organization, selection of indications, and mechanisms and criteria for reimbursement, differences between these countries can be identified. This is important, since differences in PGD provision can have enormous consequences for the access of individual patients in different countries. Somewhat paradoxically, this article concludes that even though differences in access do have serious consequences, they also serve the establishment of PGD. Developing access to PGD in national 'therapeutic cultures' can contribute to making PGD routine health care in a way that may not be achievable by harmonizing regulation.

Whilst basic science rapidly produces new insights into the biological determinants of human health and disease, clinical innovation is often said to lag behind, as it fails to rapidly turn such knowledge into new tools for innovative patient care. This view of biomedical innovation constitutes a ‘translational lag narrative’, which is widely present in current research policy. This paper presents a qualitative content analysis of a corpus of documents (n = 28) issued by key policy actors in the domain of clinical translation between 2000 and 2018 in the United States and the European Union. The aim is to reconstruct how policy discourse articulates the translational lag narrative, and to analyze how the latter relates to specific sociotechnical imaginaries of progress and of the role of policymaking in their realization. The article identifies key impediments to clinical translation and highlights salient differences in the sociotechnical imaginaries of translation in the US and the EU. In the US, policy discourse around translation is mostly driven by the perceived need to re-instate linearity in the transition from knowledge-production to clinical innovation. In the European context, instead, the driving imaginary of the policy discourse around clinical translation has to do with constructing a distinctly European model of economic growth centered around the idea of a knowledge-based economy, thereby connecting policy stimuli for translation with broader political imaginations. This analysis elucidates how publicly staged narratives about science and technology in the biomedical field simultaneously contain state-specific visions of progress and statecraft.

This article presents an innovative approach to interpreting and mending political discussions on sensitive medical-ethical issues. It adopts the idiom of co-production, which presumes that technological and political choices shape our world simultaneously, and in turn cannot be seen apart from the background that they themselves help shape. By developing the idea of a nexus, this connection between technological and political practices is further conceptualized. Through an analysis of debates on pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), this article describes the constitution of the embryo in two countries. In Germany, the embryo is seen as a full member of the human community. In contrast, in the Netherlands the embryo is largely invisible. This difference connects to radically divergent moral decisions, technological configurations and political arrangements. In turn, these different configurations reproduce particular constitutions of the embryo. The article concludes that discussions about PGD gain transparency by breaking down the relations between political and technological practices into various levels. Each of these levels offers its own way to see the embryo as a nexus between practices of politics and practices of science and technology.In the summer of 2008, news media, politicians and the broader public in the Netherlands were absorbed by a brief but vehement debate on the moral status of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). This medical technology allows prenatal testing and selection of an embryo created in vitro before implantation into the mother's womb. At the start of this controversy, PGD had already been utilized for more than 10 years. Hence, the debate in r

Solidarity is widely described as one of the leading principles for the public provision of health care in Western Europe and is therefore prominently discussed in debates on the introduction of genetic technologies in national health care provision arrangements. However, solidarity is often defined in an essentialist and quantitative way, which does very little to show the complexities of and changes in health care allocation. In this paper we therefore propose to analyze solidarity as a value that is reproduced in practices of providing health care. This means that we analyzed how three particular genetic technologies are incorporated in basic health care provision in Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom and how individuals or groups at risk get access to them. On the basis of a characterization of the distributive mechanisms in these three countries, we argue for a discussion on genetics and solidarity that pays attention to the complexity and specificity of practices in the analysis and politics of solidarity.