Experimenting with care and cod: On document-practices, versions of care and fish as the new experimental animal.

A key ambition in care studies has been to study care in practice and as practice. By turning towards practices, care studies has rendered visible and acknowledged important work that is not captured through looking at formal procedures or official and written materials, such as policy documents and medical protocols. In this literature, document materials and the written have often been seen as unable to demonstrate and address the 'specificities of care' (Mol et al., 2010, p. 9). We challenge this view by showing how pragmatically-oriented approaches can be extended to the procedural and formalized aspects of care practices. We draw upon fieldwork in the life sciences-comparative immunology-investigated through experiments on Atlantic cod (Gadus Morhua). How to care for fish is a contested domain; many uncertainties exist around how to care for fish so that legal requirements are met. We ask: How are existing legal and ethical principles and procedures put to work in cod immunology and animal research? By what document-practices and document-tools is care for cod in research negotiated and settled? How does the cod stand out as an object of care in the life sciences? Our article answers these questions by empirically teasing out how scientists navigate the terrain and arguing for the importance of bringing the document-based realities of animal research into analysis. We do this by delineating three different versions of care: procedural care, skilled care, and dispassionate care.

Nonhuman Primates in Public Health: Between Biological Standardization, Conservation and Care.

By the mid-1960s, nonhuman primates had become key experimental organisms for vaccine development and testing, and was seen by many scientists as important for the future success of this field as well as other biomedical undertakings. A major hindrance to expanding the use of nonhuman primates was the dependency on wild-captured animals. In addition to unreliable access and poor animal health, procurement of wild primates involved the circulation of infectious diseases and thus also public health hazards. This paper traces how the World Health Organization (WHO) became involved in the issue of primate supply, and shows how by the late 1960s concerns for vaccine development and the conservation of wildlife began to converge. How did the WHO navigate public health and animal health? What characterized the response and with what implications for humans and animals? The paper explores how technical standards of care were central to managing the conflicting concerns of animal and human health, biological standardization, and conservation. While the WHO's main aim was to prevent public health risks, I argue that imposing new standards of care implied establishing new hierarchies of humans and animals, and cultures of care.

Developing a Collaborative Agenda for Humanities and Social Scientific Research on Laboratory Animal Science and Welfare.

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.