Syntesebiologien mellem organisme og maskine

The Department for Media, Cognition, and Communication of the University of Copenhagen, in association with the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics of Oxford University, are pleased to present

Organism and Machine:

The Conceptual and Normative

Challenges of Synthetic Biology

Date: Friday, January 14, 2011, 9.00-17.30
Venue: University of Copenhagen, Faculty of Humanities, KUA

Program
9.00-9.15: Welcome
9.15-10.15: Peter McLaughlin (Heidelberg), ‘The Blindness of the Watchmaker and the Super-vision of the Breeder’
10.15-11.15: Tim Lewens (Cambridge), ‘Does Mother Nature Know Best? On Rational Organic Design’
Break
11.45-12.45: Randolph Nesse (Michigan, Ann Arbor), ‘How the Machine Metaphor Holds Back Biology and Medicine’
Lunch
13.45-14.45: Mark Bedau (Reed College), ‘How Emergence Drives the Ethics and Politics of Synthetic Biology’
14.45-15.45: Julian Savulescu (Oxford),’The Ethical Implications of Designing Life’
Break
16.15-17.15: Jacob Boomsma (Copenhagen), ‘Will the Services of Synthetic Organisms be Brief, Transient and Ultimately Dangerous?’
17.15-17.30: Concluding Remarks

REGISTRATION is free, but please e-mail Sune Holm by January 6, 2011 if you would like to attend (suneh [at] hum.ku.dk)

SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY is rapidly emerging as one of the most promising fields of science and technology, with the potential to deliver enormous benefits in a wide range of areas, including pharmaceuticals, energy, agriculture, pollution and climate change. The vision of synthetic biologists is a future where humans engage in the large-scale design and creation of new forms of life that are exquisitely tailored for human purposes. The genetic engineering of organisms, and the wholesale design and manufacture of living things from virtual genetic sequences, are blurring the line between machine and organism, life and nonlife, and the natural and the artificial, transforming the relationship between humankind and nature in ways that are exciting to some people but unsettling for others.

THIS WORKSHOP will bring together an interdisciplinary group of experts, including specialists in evolutionary biology, medicine, bioethics, and philosophy of science, to explore the conceptual, theoretical, and ethical dimensions of the machine-organism distinction. It will aim to address the following questions: Is the traditional machine-organism comparison one of analogy or disanalogy? How do engineering principles and machine metaphors figure into biological and biomedical science, and what are the limits to their utility? How shall we situate the products of synthetic biology vis-à-vis our traditional ontological categories of ‘engineered machine’ and ‘naturally selected organism’? Are these distinctions of normative significance? How might these categories inform (or misinform) bioethical discussions in relation to emerging biotechnologies? A central goal of the workshop will be to highlight the ways in which the conceptual problems associated with synthetic biology inform and shape the ethical analyses.

The workshop is sponsored by UNIK Synthetic Biology, University of Copenhagen

23. nordiske medisinhistoriske kongress

Call for Papers

The XXIIIrd Nordic Medical History Congress

The Norwegian Museum for Science,

Technology, Industry and Medicine,

Oslo,

Norway

25.-27. May 2011

Key Note Speakers: John Pickstone, Ludmilla Jordanova, Nick Hopwood
Graduate students course: In connection with the congress, Ludmilla Jordanova will chair a graduate students course, limited to 15 students. Wednesday May 25th from 0900 -1300.
Submissions relating to all historical periods and a broad range of topics are welcome, as long as they offer historical perspectives on issues relating to medicine, health and healthcare. Especially encouraged are topics thematizing: * Production of knowledge within different professional groups and among patients in the history of health and medicine * Collection and use of oral sources within health- and medical history * Historical perspectives on medical imaging and the development and use of visual representations within the history of health and medicine * Neurology and brain research. (A new exhibition on this topic opens at the National Medical Museum in spring 2011 and will be presented at the seminar) * History of psychiatry * History of global connections in health and medicine

Abstracts should not exceed one page. They should contain a title and the speaker's contact information (name, affiliation, address and email address). Proposals for sessions
including three or four papers are also welcome. Papers can be in English or a Scandinavian language. Please indicate which language you will use.
Please submit all proposals for papers and sessions, and application for participation in the phd-seminar to medisin@tekniskmuseum.no or Nasjonalt medisinsk museum, Kjelsåsveien 143, 0491 Oslo no later than 1.March 2011.
Abstracts must be submitted no later than 1.3.2011 .
The conference will start with lunch Wednesday May 25th, and will finish with lunch Friday May 27th. Registration fee will be NOK 2000,-. This includes seminar participation, joint lunch and dinner Wednesday and Thursday, as well as lunch on Friday. Travel and accommodation must be organized and paid for by each participant.
On behalf of the organizating committee:

Olav Hamran
The Norwegian Museum of Science, Technology, Industry and Medicine
medisin [at] tekniskmuseum.no

Anne Kveim Lie
Section for Medical Antropology and Medical History,
University of Oslo
a.h.k.lie [at] medisin.uio.no

Key Note speakers --- Short Biographies:

John Pickstone founded the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester, where he is now Wellcome Research Professor. He has published widely on modern medical history, including the history of cancer, mental health and recent English Health Services. His book Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science, Technology and Medicine (Manchester and Chicago, 2000 – and article in Isis, 2007) is an original attempt to cover the history of science, technology and medicine, emphasising different forms of practices -- a historiographical project he is extending towards communicative arts. Among his other recent publications are Madness, Medicine and Social History Essays in Honour of Roy Porter (Palgrave 2007), Surgeons, Manufacturers and Patient. A Transatlantic History of the Total Hip Replacement (with J. Anderson and F. Neary, Palgrave 2007) and The Modern Biological and Earth Sciences (vol 6 of the Cambridge History of Science, ed with Peter Bowler, 2009).

Ludmilla Jordanova is Professor in Modern History at King’s College, London. She has written widely about the cultural history of science and medicine, on gender and the family and on visual and material culture. She will be known to medical historians for important contributions such as Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries, (University of Wisconsin Press 1989), Nature Displayed: Gender, Science and Medicine 1760-1820 (Longman 1999), and Defining Features: Scientific and Medical Portraits 1660-2000, (Reaktion Books 2000). She has also written the much used History in Practice (Arnold, 2000, 2nd edition 2006), and is currently completing a book which explores the role of visual and material culture in historical practice, entitled The Look of the Past, to be published by Cambridge University Press.

Nick Hopwood is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, where he runs a Wellcome Trust-funded programme that is reassessing the history of reproduction from antiquity to the present day. He is the author of Embryos in Wax (Whipple Museum, 2002), co-editor (with Soraya de Chadarevian) of Models (Stanford, 2004), co-author (with Tatjana Buklijas) of the online exhibition Making Visible Embryos (2008) and co-editor (with Simon Schaffer and Jim Secord) of Seriality and Scientific Objects in the Nineteenth Century (a special double issue of History of Science, 2010). He is currently finishing a book, Pictures of Evolution and Charges of Forgery, about the most controversial images in the history of science and why they became some of the most standard.