n their introduction to this collection, Casper and Koenig offer four idioms through which to consider the transformative role of technology in biomedicine. To begin with, they consider technologies as agents, through which "health, illness, and disease may be reframed and redefined, given potent new meanings" (p. 524). Second, they point out the importance of technologies as a feature of "local sites ... ranging from human bodies to families to clinics to large-scale managed care facilities [which] may be reshaped and reorganized as new technologies are introduced and used" (p. 524). Further, they state that biomedical technologies may be used as "lenses for looking at questions in new ways, allowing us to challenge extant categories and cross previously mapped borders" (p. 524). In addition, biomedical technologies are "places where nature and culture, health and illness, and communities of people intersect" (p. 524). Each of these idioms, of biomedical technologies as agents, sites, lenses, or intersections, offers important alternatives to the notion that such instruments are "simply tools"-the "mere vehicles" of instrumental reason, experimental science, or clinical therapies. In turn, as the seven exemplary articles included here go on to show, an increasingly rich and varied set of theoretical and methodological approaches have begun to be developed as part of a reinvigorated hermeneutics of biomedicine as culture. Given the formative importance to anthropology of questions concerning the meaning and value of human life, the "thickness" of material culture, and the unique importance of knowledge systems and cultural practices offering control over the causality of illness and death, it is surprising that a more robust intertextuality connecting medical anthropology to science studies has not become a central field in late-20th-century Euro-American anthropology. But the reasons why a serious challenge to the givenness of scientific truth and biological fact (and to the authority of medical-scientific expertise or efficacy of biomedical technology) has been resisted are equally clear. A persistent divide exists within anthropology, as elsewhere, between a willingness to countenance a degree of cultural and historical