Future Bodies in Vaccine Trial Science Practice

Abstract: This article will focus on temporality in how contemporary biomedical vaccine trial science imagines the human body and the immune system. It presents sociological interpretations on medical research from an ethnographic study where a pharmaceutical trial testing a diarrhea vaccine was followed for two years. The trial offers an opportunity to discuss various ways in which medical researchers view and enact their objects of research, human corporeality and relationality with bacteria, both as lived everyday experience during trials – in this case in Western Africa and Northern Europe - and during the processes of designing, carrying out and explaining the trials to diverse audiences. We suggest that the focus on time and futurity in a trial brings to the fore different conceptualizations of the human body. This has to do with indeterminacy in knowing the body as an object in the immediate present. We will argue that open-ended orientations into futurity enables the vaccine trial to hold together its diverse ontological and epistemic assumptions about the body.