Lawrence Cohen is Associate Professor of Anthropology and of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and Director of the Medical Anthropology Program. Since 1993 he has been studying the relation between sex and understandings of political and market forms in north India, along with a linked study of relations between science and cosmopolitanism in the constitution of the emergent gay social movement in urban north India. His 1998 book No Aging in India: Alzheimer's, the Bad Family, and Other Modern Things uses a study of the constitution of senility as a problem to think about the use of the family in the making of postcolonial social science. Since 1998, Cohen has been studying the surgical operation as a political form over the past century, focusing on the cases of transplantation, sterilization, sex-change, and cataract removal.