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This book examines how government and scientific interventions have recast the Chernobyl aftermath as a complex political and health experience with its own bureaucratic and legal ramifications. In Ukraine, a decade after the Chernobyl disaster, waves of citizens poured into medical offices for care and compensation. Their “idiosyncratic” diseases would now encode different kinds of treatment discriminations and different kinds of neglect. The book shows how the Chernobyl explosion has been shaped as a tekhnohenna katastrofa, or technogenic catastrophe, and how Ukraine's response to the disaster combines humanism with strategies of governance and state building, market strategies with forms of economic and political corruption. The book focuses on the emergence of a collective and individual survival strategy known as biological citizenship, which it argues reflects a failure of politics and science to account for human welfare, particularly the welfare of Chernobyl sufferers.

This chapter examines the experiential and political aspects of biological citizenship in post-Soviet Ukraine, with particular emphasis on the relationship between an emerging medical classification of the ill effects of the Chernobyl disaster and the social process of distribution of disability entitlements. Drawing on the experiences of three sufferers, the chapter considers the kind of experiences and social initiatives that have emerged between state medical classification and the redistribution of social welfare goods. It also explores the importance that Soviet administrators placed on the environment as a political tool to “normalize” catastrophe, and how that normalized environment influenced life stories and medical case histories. Finally, it discusses the ways that law, medicine, and corruption intersected with respect to the processing of disability claims.

This chapter summarizes the book's main findings and their implications. It describes the Chernobyl aftermath as a prism that reflects, contains, and reconfigures the vexed political-economic, scientific, legal, and social circumstances in post-Soviet Ukraine. It emphasizes the disharmony among lawmakers, radiation scientists, health professionals, and sufferers as they stood along the continuum of knowledge production, power, moral sensibility, and self-disclosure. It considers how the radiation research process facilitated the naturalization of illnesses in bodies as a matter of “social health.” The chapter also discusses a number of ethical issues that bear on the fate of Chernobyl sufferers; for example, how future changes in social and economic contexts will affect the legitimacy of compensation mechanisms and categories of suffering. Biological citizenship, it argues, represents a complex intersection of social institutions and the intense vulnerabilities of populations exposed to the determinations of the international political economy.

This chapter examines the social and political impact of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor explosion from the perspective of radiation monitoring, clinical practices of radiation medicine, and compensation strategies. The experiences of workers of the contaminated zone and their transit through scientific research centers, public health bureaucracies, and activist organizations are documented. Together, these institutions mediate an informal economy of illness and claims to “biological citizenship”—a massive demand for, but selective access to, a form of social welfare based on scientific and legal criteria that both acknowledges injury and compensates for it. In the effort to map environmental contamination, to measure individual and population-wide exposures, and to arbitrate claims of illness, public health policies have recast the Chernobyl aftermath as a complex political and technical experience, with its own bureaucratic and legal contours which contributes to an increase of illness claims and social suffering.

This chapter examines how the self and social identity have been transformed in post-Soviet Ukraine within the legal and medical context of claiming illness from radiation dose exposure. It shows how the political and bureaucratic aspects of Chernobyl pervaded sufferers' lives, bringing to the fore the complexity of life's disruption by unstable parental and marital relations, unpredictable physical symptoms and emotional stress, patterns of hospitalization, unemployment, and bureaucratic transactions. The chapter tells the story of an elderly couple, using the concept of lichnost', or personhood, to shed light on some of the social and personal dynamics that influenced their life. It explains how the husband's pains, truths, instincts, and acts became key components in realization of his biological citizenship. It also considers how the deep intrusion of illness into personal lives fostered a type of violence that went beyond the line of what could be policed.

Bioterrorism has emerged as a prominent fear of the modern age, alongside revolutions in biological science and changing practices of warfare. Bioterrorism is also an important, and often overlooked, site for studying the cultural politics of nature. Nature is at the center of contemporary concerns as never before, but its forms are no longer recognizable in a traditional sense. Massive expenditures on disease control over the last century have been a central site for the production of nature. Institutions of health, war, and science built around modern natures, are setting new terms for biological citizenship and environmental futures for the 21^st century. The introduction overviews key histories of bioterrorism and theoretical underpinnings for a critical study of biosecurity.

This chapter argues that making up the thirsty consumer has been an important element in the formation of markets in bottled water. It traces the emergence of the concept of ‘hydration’ from its origins in exercise science, considering its contemporary use, function, and deployment by the beverage industry. Hydration is centrally involved in the process of creating attachments between people and bottled water. This process has involved tapping into some of the dispositional tendencies and practices through which late 20^th century consumers were making themselves into subjects: discourses of health and personal performance in particular. The story of hydration reveals how biomedical technologies of the self can be made to double up as ‘market devices’, offering specific procedures for assessing the self and calculating the body’s needs. The chapter gives a sociomaterial answer to the question: how have we become so thirsty?

Based on interviews with parents of a child with autism, Chapter 4 investigates the social and moral context surrounding decisions to donate blood and medical information to an autism genomic database. Three narratives of participation are analyzed, including the ‘altruistic parent,’ ‘the obligated parent,’ and the ‘diagnostic parent.’

Fears of bioterrorism persist more than a decade after 9/11, continuing to shape public health practice and scientific research. The conclusion revisits two themes of the book: that the materiality of microbes matters, and that by changing what it means to be human and a biological citizen, microbes create new systems of governance for a world full of unspecified risks. Whether there exists a biological threat or not, the work to prepare the nation is shaping citizens’ lives. I draw attention to the outcomes of bioterrorism preparedness not because they are inevitable consequences of the search for national security, but because we have the ability to make different choices to create the biological future in which we want to live.

Chapter 5 investigates what matters in every day life from the perspective of adults on the autism spectrum. It investigates how these individuals negotiate scientific notions of autism within a genetic framework, as well as their awareness and attitude about genetic testing for autism.

Chapter 3 charts the scientific and social histories of investigating autism as genetic (one gene/one autism) and shifts to genomics (many genes/many autisms). It traces the initial optimism and subsequent failure to find a major gene for autism, and technological convergence of “autisms” with multiple diseases at the molecular level.