…I follow the OpenAPS community—a group of people with type one diabetes who engineered an open-source ‘artificial pancreas’—from their inception in the transient #WeAreNotWaiting movement to their research collaborations with endocrinologists and detente with the FDA. I argue that OpenAPS user-contributors formalized their expertise in three steps: First, they broke the OpenAPS algorithm into modules so that prospective users must become experts to assemble it. Second, they lowered this barrier to entry by facilitating the socialization of new user-contributors with a training ritual. And third, they intervened in the strained endocrinologist-patient relationship…

Although epidemics are generally understood as lying within the domain of biomedicine, legal and social arrangements play crucial roles in determining whether or not infectious disease outbreaks grow into epidemics and even pandemics. Yet epidemics are challenging terrain for legal regulation. …

Abstract: …In this article, I critically analyze HIV PrEP clinical trials, dissecting the novel techniques researchers use to demonstrate efficacy. I argue that in making sense of the interplay between adherence to a prophylactic regimen and risk for HIV, biomedical HIV prevention research has revealed a new subject of biopolitics, Homo adhaerens. …

[Covid-19’s challenges] pose important questions to policymakers: How will the FDA decide that the potential benefits of controversial novel drugs and vaccines outweigh their risks? And how will Medicare—tasked by the CARES Act with reimbursing COVID-related hospital fees—make expensive therapies available to uninsured essential workers who are the most vulnerable to the virus and least able to pay? Thankfully, these uncertainties are not uncharted territory:Decades of experience with HIV/AIDS have shaped regulatory institutions and provided new strategies for seeking legal remedy to reduce the price of expensive drugs.