This article examines the shifting conditions for biomedical knowledge production by studying trends in the design of biomedical experiments. The basic premise of the study is that the very act of establishing a research design entails a process involving a series of valuations where different values are evoked, ordered, and displaced. In focus is the articulation and ordering of what counts as central values in research design for two kinds of biomedical treatment trials, namely the traditional randomised controlled trial (RCT) and the emerging new form of biomarker trials used to assess biomarker/treatment combinations (BTTs). The empirical material consists of textbooks (RCTs) and journal articles (BTTs). We ask how these materials articulate the various scientific, medical, and economic values at play. Among the differences uncovered are a difference in relation to what counts as ethical in relation to prior knowledge, differences in the flexibility in design as well as the valuation of the risk for false positives and false negatives. More broadly, the study shows how textual accounts of different ways of producing knowledge are linked to partly different valuations of ethics, flexibility, and risk as part of establishing the research design of biomedical experiments.

Many deep concerns in the life sciences and medicine have to do with the enactment, ordering and displacement of a broad range of values. This volume articulates a pragmatist stance for studying the making of values in society, which means taking seriously the work scientists, regulators, analysts, professionals, and publics regularly do to define what counts as proper conduct, what is economically valuable, and what is known and worth knowing. The volume proposes the word valuography to indicate an empirically oriented research program into the simultaneous making of seemingly separate values. Exploring various sites within life sciences and medicine, this volume features in-depth studies ranging from how zoos make animal value to how health care administrators attempts to engineer fair and efficient health care markets.

The process of translation has both an excluding and including character. The analysis of actor networks, the process of mobilizing alliances, and constructing networks is a common and worthwhile focus. However, the simultaneous betrayals, dissidences, and controversies are often only implied in network construction stories. We aim to nuance the construc- tion aspect of actor–network theory (ANT) by shining the analytical searchlight elsewhere, where the theoretical tools of ANT have not yet systematically ventured. We argue that we need to understand every process of translation in relation to its simultaneous process of treason, and to add antonyms for Callon’s problematization, intressement, enrollment, and mobilization. This enables us to describe powerlessness not as a state but as a process. Our case focuses on the network building around mea- sures for disabled people in the construction of the Athens Metro, during the period 1991-1993. The discussion highlights the efforts of disability organizations to intervene in the initial construction works of the metro project and the simultaneous actions of the Greek government to exclude disability organizations from the design process and to disrupt the accessibility-metro actor network. 

The aim of this paper is to understand the ways in which the biosciences exist in a situation where values of pure and disinterested science meet imperatives to innovate on the basis of economic interests. I show how both these facets of the biosciences, purity and interest, are assembled in complex manners, with large consequences for how the biosciences are evaluated, socially, economically, and methodologically.

Here, I propose analyzing the dichotomous relationship between purity/interest through two modes of purification: temporal and organizational. These two modes of purification have different consequences for how the biosciences are evaluated as Good Science, and are tied to different valorizations of the "linear model" as well as "hybrid science". Thus, I attempt to complicate Boltanski & Thévenot's analysis of justification to stress the performative aspects of coordination and conflict between different orders of worth.

Concretely, the paper's focus is the studied actors’ performance of science as a moral or political project and the ways in which epistemological yardsticks – such as antibody-specificity or experimental replicability – are intertwined with and contrasted against other yardsticks – like production efficiency or medical utility. The questions that the actors grapple with are “What is Good Science?” and “What should the life sciences be concerned with?”

The aim of this paper is to understand the ways in which the biosciences exist in a situation where values of pure and disinterested science meet imperatives to innovate on the basis of economic interests. I show how both these facets of the biosciences, purity and interest, are assembled in complex manners, with large consequences for how the biosciences are evaluated, socially, economically, and methodologically. Here, I propose analyzing the dichotomous relationship between purity/interest through two modes of purification: temporal and organizational. These two modes of purification have different consequences for how the biosciences are evaluated as Good Science, and are tied to different valorizations of the "linear model" as well as "hybrid science". Thus, I attempt to complicate Boltanski & Thévenot's analysis of justification to stress the performative aspects of coordination and conflict between different orders of worth. Concretely, the paper's focus is the studied actors’ performance of science as a moral or political project and the ways in which epistemological yardsticks – such as antibody-specificity or experimental replicability – are intertwined with and contrasted against other yardsticks – like production efficiency or medical utility. The questions that the actors grapple with are “What is Good Science?” and “What should the life sciences be concerned with?”

Biomedicine – health care and the life sciences – are saturated with values. Valuations of life itself are intermingled with values such as scientific reputation, profitability, fairness, competition, and accessibility of care. Reciprocally, the practices of biomedicine produce values, for instance: public health, the preservation of endangered species, profitability of tamed animals for farming, usability of clinical data, or bodily autonomy.What sets this book apart from many of the dominant theoretical approaches to values (in economics, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, history) is that we take an interest not primarily in values as given entities, but rather as how they are enacted in practices. This leads us down an analytical route where values are seen as the outcome of work, where they are the result of a wide range of activities. Fairness, to take an example that often has currency in the provision of health care services, is thus seen as a value that is inseparable from the work evoking it. In an effort to chart a “value practices” approach to the concerns raised above, we aim to focus on how values are enacted: in actions, in technical practices, and in practices of valuation. Here we will provide some first parts of an outline for such an approach to the study of values as they are enacted in biomedicine. The exercise is rooted in an ambition to consider “values” as something to be explained and explored rather than as a given entity with explanatory power. In this we will try to account both how peoples’ actions draw on values, and how agents’ actions and reactions come to enact values.