A crowd-sourced Indiegogo funding campaign that raised over $45,000 for do-it-yourself gene editing kits in December, asks: “If you had access to modern synthetic biology tools, what would you create?” This campaign, which aims to democratize science “so everyone has access,” was launched by Josiah Zayner, who earned a PhD in Molecular Biophysics from the University of Chicago. For $130 …
Tag Archives: Biosecurity
Ebola and Localizing the “Global Other” in the United States
This article is part of the series: Ebola fieldnotes
The outbreak of Ebola in Western Africa has spurred a great deal of anxiety among state and local public health officials in the United States. The initial arrival of the disease in the United States with a Liberian immigrant in Texas exposed the shortcomings of a response system that relied heavily on guidance and protocols from medical organizations emphasizing protective …
Caring as existential insecurity: quarantine, care, and human insecurity in the Ebola crisis
This article is part of the series: Ebola fieldnotes
In August of this year, when the Ebola outbreak escalated in Liberia and a state of emergency had been declared for the country, Fatu Kekula, a young Liberian nursing student, improvised personal protective equipment (PPE) to care for her father, mother, sister, and cousin. After three of the relatives survived, her method was featured prominently in the international news media …
Ebola 2014. Chronicle of a well-prepared disaster
This article is part of the series: Ebola fieldnotes
A French version of this piece was originally published in Libération on 18 September 2014.
“It is useless to laboriously interpret disaster movies in terms of their relation to an ‘objective’ social crisis or even to an ‘objective’ phantasm of disaster,” wrote Jean Baudrillard in 1981. “It is in another sense that (…) it is the social itself that, in …
From the dragon’s perspective: an initial report on China’s response to the unfolding Ebola epidemic
This article is part of the series: Ebola fieldnotes
On a steamy mid-August afternoon, Mariatu Kargbo, a Sierra Leonian expat residing in Beijing, stood at the front of a packed hotel ballroom. As reported by Xinhua News (新华网), Kargbo addressed the crowd, saying:
…I know everyone has come because they would like to support us, but I really didn’t know that today so many people would come, thank you
Against Sick States: Ebola Protests in Austerity Spain
This article is part of the series: Ebola fieldnotes
A few months ago, the independent Spanish online newspaper El Diario published a cartoon entitled “Ebola in Madrid”. It showed a health worker, camouflaged in a green protection suit, wearing a white head shield and goggles, leaning over a patient almost completely hidden under the sheets of the hospital bed. The huge hospital room is deserted and empty, …