Plastic pigs and public secrets in translational neonatology in Denmark

The paper investigates how the invisibility and un-public status of research piglets in Denmark contributes to human health in translational neonatology, and how visibility and invisibility are navigated across lab and clinic. Situated within debates on translational medicine and public health, the study addresses the paradox that animal models central to translational research are largely absent from public accounts. Using the concept of healthy publics, and theories of secrecy/unknowing, the authors ask how practices of visibility/invisibility and public/un-public beings shape the production of health for premature infants. The Danish context—high public trust, universal healthcare, strong pork industry, and uncontroversial use of pigs in research—provides a backdrop for examining multispecies relations in a preterm pig model used to study conditions such as necrotising enterocolitis (NEC) and their translation into NICU practice.

The introduction engages literature on translational medicine and its political economy (Marincola 2003; Curry 2008; Cooper 2012), the centrality yet invisibility of animal models in biomedicine and public health (Friese & Latimer 2019; Sharp 2014, 2019; Rock et al. 2014; Svendsen 2017), and calls for more-than-human public health (Friese & Nuyts 2017; Hinchliffe et al. 2018). It discusses transparency and selective openness in animal research (Jasanoff 2006; Birchall 2011; McLeod & Hobson-West 2016; Holmberg & Ideland 2010), and draws on Taussig’s notion of public secrets and Geissler’s anthropology of unknowing to analyze how unarticulated practices sustain social order and public health research. Work on care, potentiality, and multispecies ethnography (Haraway 2008; Latimer 2013; Despret 2004; Taussig et al. 2013) frames the study’s attention to the plasticity of pigs and the affective, ethical dimensions of laboratory and clinical care.

Ethnographic, multi-sited and multispecies study of translational neonatology in Denmark. Fieldwork by the first author (with co-authors’ collaboration) encompassed: (a) Animal laboratory: January 2013–June 2014 participation in NEOMUNE-related activities, including six intensive weeks during pig experiments, completion of the laboratory animal science course, monthly management and fortnightly team meetings, travel to conferences, and shadowing researchers and piglets across experimental spaces; (b) Interviews: seven with researchers involved in pig studies and seven with NEOMUNE steering group members; (c) Clinical site: July 2013–January 2014 observation of NICU clinical work at Copenhagen University Hospital during preparations for the first bovine colostrum study, plus 14 interviews with parents about experiences/expectations of feeding bovine colostrum to premature infants. The study situates the NEOMUNE Centre (2012–2018), a publicly funded translational platform linking animal research, NICUs, and industry. Ethical/data governance: Danish qualitative research ethics approvals not required; study approved by the Danish Data Protection Authorities. Analysis focuses on practices of care, visibility/invisibility, and unknowing across lab, clinic, and conferences.

• Translational value depends on un-publicness and plasticity: The preterm piglets’ value as models is tied to their relational and material plasticity and to the maintenance of private spaces where intimate cross-species care occurs, outside general public view.
• Publication work: The authors introduce “publication work” to denote the boundary labor that makes translational animal science publicly shareable. It involves knowing animals intimately in private spaces (where piglets become almost patients) and unknowing those relations in public outputs (where animals become standardized data for graphs/tables).
• Zones of unknowing enable care and translation: Protecting private spaces and selectively omitting piglets’ lives/suffering from public accounts facilitates ethical deliberation, interdisciplinary collaboration, and the transformation of care into translatable knowledge.
• Cross-species and cross-professional plasticity: In the lab, animal researchers, clinicians, and even social scientists shift roles—researchers become ‘mini-neonatologists’; piglets are treated almost as neonatal patients—enhancing solidarity and translational momentum.
• Clinical unknowing and differentiation of human lives: NICU cases (e.g., decisions to withdraw futile treatment) show that forming healthy publics entails differentiating human lives; yet in animal lab/public presentations, human infants are stabilized as intrinsically worthy, while more compromised infant trajectories are made unknown.
• Visibility strategies: Public presentations begin with compelling human clinical frames followed by pig-based statistics, consistently leaving out the piglets’ biographical care and suffering, aligning with scientific norms and societal relevance requirements.
• Danish context facilitates collaboration: High public trust, welfare state support, and pigs’ status as production animals make pig-based translational research politically uncontroversial and operationally feasible.
• NEOMUNE platform: Public-private collaboration (including a 60 million DKK grant) enabled bench-to-bedside movement (e.g., initiating bovine colostrum studies) but required careful management of public/un-public boundaries.

The findings show that practices of visibility and invisibility are constitutive of translational neonatology. By crafting zones of unknowing, researchers and clinicians create protected spaces to care for neonates (pig and human) and to negotiate moral boundaries that otherwise blur between species and between life/death. This unknowing is not mere secrecy but ethical boundary work that permits relational plasticity to flourish, enabling piglets to become compelling models and professionals to align care practices across lab and clinic. Publication work operationalizes this by transforming intimate, situated care into standardized, publicly acceptable knowledge while safeguarding the private spaces that make such knowledge possible. The study reframes the relationship between transparency and public trust: privateness can support public good, as public institutions and professionals strive to honor societal expectations while navigating complex, more-than-human publics. It challenges assumptions that openness alone yields trust, showing instead that ethical, situated boundary-making underpins successful translation and healthy publics.

Creating healthy publics in translational neonatology hinges on both knowing and unknowing. In the animal lab, piglets receive meticulous, individualized care and can become almost patients, enhancing their translational quality; in the NICU, clinicians carefully deliberate life-sustaining versus futile treatments, sometimes prioritizing family and societal considerations. The concept of “publication work” captures how intimate cross-species care in private spaces is essential to producing publicly shareable scientific knowledge, requiring active boundary-drawing between public and private, human and animal, life and death. The paper suggests that public trust is sustained not solely by transparency but by professionals’ ethical commitments within publicly funded institutions to manage these boundaries responsibly. Knowing/unknowing and public/private are not fixed dichotomies; they are continually rebuilt and linked in the pursuit of more-than-human public health.