There have been many controversies about substantial and sudden jumps in pharmaceutical prices, the most memorable/infamous surrounding Martin Shkreli, the [widely despised and thoroughly unrepentant] former CEO of the drug company Turing, and the 5000% increase in the price of a drug used by many AIDS patients. Similar questions of impropriety have been raised by the practices …
Tag Archives: Biotechnology
Book Forum––Carlo Caduff’s The Pandemic Perhaps
This article is part of the series: Book forum
Carlo Caduff’s The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events in a Public Culture of Danger (University of California Press, 2015) is a story of the influenza pandemic that never was. Caduff tells this story from an American perspective through his encounters with scientists and other actors who engage in the august work of “preparedness,” but in doing so, often draw upon …
Web Roundup: Biohacking, BioArt, and other Playful Abominations
These days, it is fun to “hack” almost everything. You can hack your life, you can hack your home, and you can even hack your period. So, as the web continues to grow more material on synthetic biology, let us turn once again to the world of biohacking.
A particularly interesting piece considers the possibility of …
Limn issue no. 5: Ebola’s Ecologies
This article is part of the series: Ebola fieldnotes
We’d like to help spread the word about the recent issue of Limn, edited by Andrew Lakoff, Stephen J. Collier and Christopher Kelty, now in print.
From the editors:
“This issue of Limn on “Ebola’s Ecologies” examines how the 2014 Ebola outbreak has put the norms, practices, and institutional logics of global health into question, and examines the new assemblages …
Hallam Stevens’ Life Out of Sequence
Life Out of Sequence: A Data-driven History of Bioinformatics
The University of Chicago Press, 2013. 294 pages.
Life Out of Sequence is a lucid ethnographic and historical account of how computational tools changed how biologists think about and engage with living systems. In it, Hallam Stevens tells a captivating story about how genes and genomes become …
Book Forum––Warwick Anderson and Ian R. Mackay’s “Intolerant Bodies”
We are happy to present a book forum organized around the release of Warwick Anderson and Ian R. Mackay‘s Intolerant Bodies: A Short History of Autoimmunity (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). Here, a “short” history should not be mistaken for one that is “thin” – Anderson and Mackay masterfully navigate a terrain populated as much by bodies as ideas. …