Through the Looking Glass: Past Futures of Brain Research

A brain worth keeping? Waste, value and time in contemporary brain banking

If a temporal rather than spatial concept of waste is adopted, novel categories emerge which are useful for identifying and understanding logics of temporality at play in determining what is kept in contemporary brain banks, and reveal that brain banks are constituted by more than stored materials. First, I apply the categories analytically on a recent UK brain banking discussion among professionals. This analysis highlights the importance of data in brain banks, as well as the centrality of ideas about pasts and futures in the discussions. Secondly, I investigate the case of a seven decades old, Danish brain bank which had been reduced to its physically stored material for 24 years, before being reinstituted in 2006. This case demonstrates the importance of material and conceptual infrastructures that co-constitute a collection, as they make up an experimental system that is crucial to maintaining the collection's continued relevance and usefulness as a scientific institution.

[A new classification for better care. The promises of the translational psychiatric neuroscience]

This article explores the way neuroscientists call for the "deconstruction" of the classifications of mental disorders as we know them, in order to provide solutions to the slowdown of therapeutical innovation in psychiatry. It is based on the case study of the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project of the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). My purpose is to show that neuroscience interested in mental disorders offers narratives of innovation, transformation, and desirable futures that are at the heart of the ambitious current research projects and influence them. I approach the versions of the futures proposed by the promoters of translational psychiatric neuroscience in terms of productivity at the scientific, epistemological and socio-political levels.