In this paper, we explore how the definition of life takes on an essential character in the ethical debates around health technologies, with life thus being manufactured in the tensions and conflicts around the use of such artefacts and devices. We introduce concepts from science and technology studies (STS) to approach bioethics, overcoming the dualistic conception that separates the natural and the technological and questioning the dominant rationality that divides life into dualities. Drawing on two research projects in which we (...) have been involved in recent years, one regarding biobanks and the other regarding social care robots, we explore how the ethical discussions about biobanks and robots imply particular notions of life. We argue that the contemporary epistemic category of life is a manufactured life in which various rationalities coexist: one rationality based on a separation between the technological and the human, focused on pragmatism and functionalities that tend towards a dualized notion of life divided into qualified and non-qualified life, and another rationality based on a non-essentialist ontology, focused on the mediating role of health technologies, that entails a distributed life appearing as a precarious effect of a network. Each of these rationalities allows the emergence of different issues and ethical concerns, thus enriching the bioethical debate. (shrink)

From the year 2000, on a class of biological drugs, the anti-VEGF proved to be quite effective in the treatment of retinal diseases, which have in its pathophysiological mechanism an important vascular proliferation component that can lead to blindness. Two of these drugs, bevacizumab and ranibizumab, are quite similar and have the same efficacy and safety. They were developed by the same laboratory and are commercialized by two major pharmaceutical companies through an agreement made between them. However, there is a (...) big difference in the price of the drugs. The aim of this article is to present the Bioethics of intervention as grounds for choosing the cheaper drug, even if forced to do so by regulatory entities. (shrink)