Perspectives
Historical keyword
Biocitizenship
Biological citizenship or “biocitizenship” is a keyword in-
the-making. Unrecorded by the standard dictionaries,
it seems to be emerging in tandem with the state it
seeks to describe. The term’s instability is underlined
by the fact that it appeared almost simultaneously on
different sites with quite different meanings.
The word seems to have first appeared in 2002 in
the title of Andriana Petryna’s Life Exposed: Biological
Citizens After Chernobyl. For Petryna, biocitizenship
described the individual and collective welfare claims
made by a biologically damaged population, as well as
the political exploitation of those injuries in Ukranian
nationalism. As such, this use of biocitizenship involved
the application of familiar western notions concerning
the mutual “rights and duties” of citizens and states.
Wholly at odds with this use, however, is another that
appeared only a few years later. For Nikolas Rose and
Carlos Novas in their essay on “Biological Citizenship”
(Global Assemblages, 2005) this term described
new connections being made between biology
and self-identity. They argued that contemporary
biotechnology makes possible new ideas of what it
means to be a human being. They present the human
body as a fragmented, biotechnologically exploitable
consumer object that can be physically reshaped by
“enhancement technologies” or the consumption of
new psychopharmaceuticals. Moreover, this biological
consumerism largely takes place in a global marketplace
that is increasingly disconnected from national politics.
It is in this supra-national space that people are now
“made up”—not as citizens with rights and duties
bound to nation states, but as biological consumers.
Thus for Rose and Novas, biocitizenship signifies a
radical departure from the nationally located ideas of
social citizenship predominate in western Europe since
the mid-20th-century.
Although Rose and Novas did not intend the term
as prescriptive, critics have seized upon it (and them)
as upholding a dangerous alternative to social and
political citizenship. Perceived as celebrating the
market and individual consumers, it is held to threaten
representative democracy and social welfare. In view of
these criticisms, biocitizenship may emerge thus less as
a keyword than a watchword for the relations between
politics, identity, and biology in the 21st century.
Roger Cooter
Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL
r.cooter@ucl.ac.uk
www.thelancet.com Vol 372 November 15, 2008
Lifeline
Mirta Roses-Periago is an epidemiologist who
specialised in tropical medicine. She has 25 years of service
in the international public health arena, in addition to her
work as a practitioner, researcher, and teacher in her native
Argentina. In 2003 she became the first woman elected as
Director of the Pan American Health Organization and the
first female Regional Director of WHO.
What has been the greatest achievement of your career?
Being able to break the glass ceiling and being entrusted
PAHO
with leading an organisation with such an outstanding
record of achievements on public health.
Who is your favourite politician and why?
Gandhi. He demonstrated the power of leadership and
persuasion with a clear goal to bring everyone on board.
Who inspired you?
Professors that taught medicine as a philosophy and
philosophy as a medicine.
What would be your advice to a newly qualified doctor?
To always remember that we became doctors because we
cared and we wanted to serve. So, patients’ wellbeing and
public health must be our foremost consideration.
How do you relax?
Meditation and a good sense of humour works wonders.
What is your greatest regret?
Not having enough time to listen to those around us
before they leave us for ever.
What are you currently reading?
Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save
the World by Samantha Power.
What is your worst habit?
I tend to get into the details of everything, even the
smallest ones.
In which other country would you like to live and why?
Maybe on another planet? Just to know how it is and how
people are there.
What is your idea of a perfect day?
How about one with 36 hours?
What keeps you awake at night?
Haiti, which faces unique challenges in our region that have
been compounded by a succession of storms, and where
the international community efforts must still be
significantly scaled-up.
What was your first memory?
Playing cards with my grandpa on summer vacations.
You can have dinner tonight with a famous person of
your choice (dead or alive), who would it be?
Marie Curie. I have always admired her pioneering work as
a scientist and as a woman.
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