PRIVACY, FACE, AND SOCIAL RESPECTABILITY IN A DIGITAL CHINA

This study attempts to delineate $2 when they use social media, shop online, and make electronic payments using WeChat Pay and Alipay. It is part of a book I am writing on perceptions of privacy and surveillance in China and is grounded in an inductive content analysis of 58 semi-structured in-depth interviews I conducted late 2019 in Beijing, Shanghai, and Chengdu. Privacy is written with two different words in Mandarin: $2 (a personal thing you do not wish to disclose in public akin to Western definitions) and $2 (hiding a shameful secret). Most of my interviewees used the latter meaning: $2 . Privacy, thus, was $2 , understood as $2 (moral face - e.g., purchases of personal medicine, underwear and sex-related products, or weapons) and $2 (social face - eg., financial information). Moreover, they perceived the need to hide shameful information $2 : parents and supervisors, or hackers who would disclose personal information, but less so an abstract entity such as the government. For instance, several interviewees felt they could “hide on Weibo” using a pseudonym, despite the real-name registration policy. These findings on privacy may shed slight on how Chinese citizens view the digitalization of surveillance through facial recognition monitoring and the building of the social credit system, and contribute to culture-sensitive surveillance research.

In search of ‘extra data’: Making tissues flow from personal to personalised medicine

One of the key features of the contemporary data economy is the widespread circulation of data and its interoperability. Critical data scholars have analysed data repurposing practices and other factors facilitating the travelling of data. While this approach focused on flows provides great potential, in this article we argue that it tends to overlook questions of attachment and belonging. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork within a Danish data-linkage infrastructure, and building upon insights from archival science, we discuss the work of data practitioners enabling the repurposing of pathology samples extracted from patients for the conduct of ‘personal medicine’ – our term to discuss the so-called old-fashioned treatment of patients – towards personalised medicine. This first involves ‘getting to know’ the tissues and unpacking their previous uses and meanings, then detaching them from their original source to extract data from such tissues and making them flow towards a new container where they can be worked on and connected with other data. As data practitioners make these tissues travel, transforming them into research data, they organise the attachments of data to new agendas, persons and places. Crucially, in our case, we observe the prominence of national attachments, whereby managing tissues and data in and out of containers involves tying them to the nation to serve its interests. We thus expose how the building of data linkage infrastructures entails more than the accumulation and curation of data, but also involves crafting meanings, futures and belonging to specific communities and territories.

Lab-on-a-Chip Systems for Aptamer-Based Biosensing

Aptamers are oligonucleotides or peptides that are selected from a pool of random sequences that exhibit high affinity toward a specific biomolecular species of interest. Therefore, they are ideal for use as recognition elements and ligands for binding to the target. In recent years, aptamers have gained a great deal of attention in the field of biosensing as the next-generation target receptors that could potentially replace the functions of antibodies. Consequently, it is increasingly becoming popular to integrate aptamers into a variety of sensing platforms to enhance specificity and selectivity in analyte detection. Simultaneously, as the fields of lab-on-a-chip (LOC) technology, point-of-care (POC) diagnostics, and personal medicine become topics of great interest, integration of such aptamer-based sensors with LOC devices are showing promising results as evidenced by the recent growth of literature in this area. The focus of this review article is to highlight the recent progress in aptamer-based biosensor development with emphasis on the integration between aptamers and the various forms of LOC devices including microfluidic chips and paper-based microfluidics. As aptamers are extremely versatile in terms of their utilization in different detection principles, a broad range of techniques are covered including electrochemical, optical, colorimetric, and gravimetric sensing as well as surface acoustics waves and transistor-based detection.

Letter to the British Medical Journal

In this letter to the British Medical Journal on responsibility and freedom, Winnicott discusses the role of the state and personal medicine as it pertains to what would later be called socialized medicine.