Papers in this volume discuss a variety of new social formations in a global context, including genetic data banks, committees of inquiry, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and national research laboratories.

1. Introduction: New Genetics, New Social Formations 2. British Public Attitudes to Agricultural Biotechnology and the 2003 GMN Nation?: Public Debate - Distrust, Ambivalence and Risk 3. The UK Stem Cell Bank: Creating Safe Stem Cell Lines and Public Support? 4. Public Biotechnology Inquiries: From Rationality to Reflexivity 5. The Precautionary Principle on Trial: The Construction and Transformation of the Precautionary Principle in the UK Court Context 6. The Social Construction of the Biotech Industry 7. Biopiracy and the Bioeconomy 8. Identifying John Moore: Narratives of Persona in Patent Law Relating to Inventions of Human Origin 9. Sampling policies of Isolates of Historical Interest (IHI): The Social and Historical Formation of Research Populations in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC) 10. The Making of Scientific Knowledge in the Anthropological Perspective Case Studies from the French Scientific Community 11. Genomics and the Transformation of Knowledge: The Bioinformatics Challenge 12. Science, Media and Society: The Framing of Bioethical Debates around Embryonic Stem Cell Research between 2000 and 2005 13. ‘Natural Forces’: The Regulation and Discourse of Genomics and Advanced Medical Technologies in Israel 14. Survival of the Gene?: 21st Century Visions from Genomics, Proteomics and the New Biology