Since its inception, BioSocieties has sought to publish social studies of the life sciences from around the globe. This Special Issue on Experimental Ethics, guest edited by Margaret Sleeboom-Faulkner and Bob Simpson, is a highlight of our efforts in this regard. It is also a highlight in terms of featuring issues in contemporary ethical practices that invite a comparative eye. There are articles centred on work in China, India and Sri Lanka, ranging from bioethical capacity building to clinical use of embryonic stem cells to toxicology research. An excellent introductory piece frames emergent issues in life sciences research in Asia. We hope this Special Issue will provoke further submissions that will continue to broaden the reach of BioSocieties.

From a very different angle of concern, our Books Forum for this issue is also transnational in scope. Ably edited by Nicolas Langlitz, it focuses on the formation of a new biosecurity apparatus that has expanded since 911 as the Cold War ebbed. The Forum draws together books that analyse circulations of bioinformation, dual-use technologies, national borders and various biological markers and means of identification. The reviews provide us with entree into complex domains where innovative technologies, shifts from international public health to global health, and national security intersect often in new and uncharted ways.

Let us end with a call for submissions not only of exciting articles but also of essays for our Thinking on the Edge Series, which features provocative and challenging but well-grounded arguments on hot topics related to social studies of the life sciences. In BioSocieties 7.3, we published Ilina Singh's ‘Human Development, Nature and Nurture: Working Beyond the Divide’. It was soon hailed by Philip Campbell in an editorial in Nature titled ‘Life stresses: It is time for sociologists and biologists to bury the hatchet and cooperate to study the effects of environmental stress on how people behave’. (See www.nature.com/news/life-stresses-1.11569) Engagements such as these which soften calcified boundaries are precisely what BioSocieties seeks to promote. Please help us do so.