This seminar explores anthropological perspectives on the interactions between biological and cultural systems. The goal of the seminar is to move beyond human experience as symbolic construction, and to understand how biology and pathology are expressed through and embedded in social relations and experience. We consider recent classificatory shifts in the sciences of human nature, the vexed dynamic between objectivity and uncertainty, and the ways in which scientific knowledge informs moral categories and social thought. Topics include the placebo response in sociosomatic medicine; the anthropology of the human life-span; biological anthropological perspectives on health and behavior; the uses of racial classification in medicine; eugenics, the new genetics; biotechnology in the context of epidemics and inequalities; and the role of anthropology in bioethics.