Standards, Populations, and Difference

The global reach of biomedicine (which should be distinguished from the reach of its "benefits") is a striking feature of contemporary life. It is pursued by international corporations that produce drugs that are taken by people all over the world, and is embodied in scientific research projects that carry ambitious titles such as The Human Genome Project, The Visible Human Project, and The International HapMap Project. This extensive reaching out across the globe draws attention, once again, to the question of human bodies, and of whether the human bodies that are the targets, objects, and consumers of biomedical research and its products are the same the world over—or not. In this paper, I want to consider two very different occasions in which the problem of sameness and difference was raised.