Entanglements in Health and Well‐being: Working with Model Organisms in Biomedicine and Bioscience

Abstract

Drawing on collaborative ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores how human health becomes entangled with that of model organisms in day‐to‐day biomedical science. Social science scholarship on modeling has explored either how specific models impact and shape our knowledge of human disease or how animal technicians and scientists affect laboratory animals. This article extends this relational approach by asking how embodied and institutional care practices for model organisms affect the health and well‐being of animal technicians and scientists. We focus on two interspecies bodily experiences: pathogenic exchange and stress. We then explore enrichment as a strategy for producing health and well‐being across species. We suggest that relations of care form a crucial part of biomedical knowledge production. Not only does care figure in the shaping of model organisms; care for technicians and scientists also plays a role in bioscientific knowledge production. We conclude by proposing an interspecies approach to occupational health.

Feel Good? The Dialectical Integration of International Immigrants in Rural Communities: The Case of the Canadian Prairie Provinces

“…It becomes the ability to negotiate the different ways that individuals experience and organize their integration into a community along with the ability to compromise between the values and expectations that individuals have (Hosnedlová, 2017 ; Porter, 2018 ). Therefore, it requires a certain juxtaposition of the relationships between sites: care between employers and immigrant employees; settlement organizations and regulating governing agencies; the attitudes of the rural communities receiving immigrants, as well as care for the self (Porter, 2018 ; Friese and Latimer, 2019 ).…”

The Vascularity of Ayurvedic Leech Therapy: Sensory Translations and Emergent Agencies in Interspecies Medicine

“…Multispecies ethnographies in medical anthropology have contributed to our understanding of the intertwined nature of human animal health, through engagement with therapeutic human–animal relationships (Lee Davis et al. 2015), laboratory animals (Friese and Latimer 2019), zoonosis (Keck and Lynteris 2018), and biopolitical and ecological entanglements (Brown and Nading 2019; Nading 2014). While intersecting these terrains, this ethnography of Ayurvedic leech therapy explores leeches as central actants in the intertwined processes of clinical treatment and diagnosis.…”

Plastic pigs and public secrets in translational neonatology in Denmark

“…In Denmark, as in other European countries and the US, funding agencies and governmental institutions have increasingly turned their attention to the process of "translation" between bench and bedside (Cooper, 2012). Despite this renewed political focus on the connections between animal experimentation and human healthcare, the central role of animal models in translational research (Friese and Latimer, 2019) is not reflected in public accounts regarding medicine and public health more broadly. Biomedical publications consistently leave out the life, suffering and death of research animals (Sharp, 2014(Sharp, , 2019 and both in public health science textbooks and in public communication on health, research animals are mostly invisible (Rock et al, 2014;Svendsen, 2017).…”

“…The increasing attention to the absence of animals in public accounts of human health has spurred a call for post-human explorations of how a given "human public" relies on other forms of life (Friese and Nuyts, 2017;Svendsen, 2017), and how public health, which tends to be equated with human health (Rock et al, 2014), can be approached as a shared condition of human and animal populations (Leonelli et al, 2014;Kirk, 2016;Cohn and Lynch, 2017;Hinchliffe et al, 2018;Friese, 2019;Friese and Latimer, 2019). Responding to this call for a more-than-human public health, we explore ethnographically the production of intimate and uneven relations across species and spaces that potentialise research piglets (Svendsen and Koch, 2013) as models for premature infants in translational neonatology research.…”