Biology Unmoored

Author : Sandra Bamford
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520939476
Total Pages : 246 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Biology Unmoored written by Sandra Bamford and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2007-02-20 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biology Unmoored is an engaging examination of what it means to live in a world that is not structured in terms of biological thinking. Drawing upon three years of ethnographic research in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, Sandra Bamford describes a world in which physiological reproduction is not perceived to ground human kinship or human beings' relationship to the organic world. Bamford also exposes the ways in which Western ideas about relatedness do depend on a notion of physiological reproduction. Her innovative analysis includes a discussion of the advent of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), the mapping of the human genome, cloning, the commodification of biodiversity, and the manufacture and sale of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

Author : Sandra C. Bamford
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781433701382
Total Pages : 230 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Biology Unmoored written by Sandra C. Bamford and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biology Unmoored is an engaging examination of what it means to live in a world that is not structured in terms of biological thinking. Drawing upon three years of ethnographic research in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, Sandra Bamford describes a world in which physiological reproduction is not perceived to ground human kinship or human beings' relationship to the organic world. Bamford also exposes the ways in which Western ideas about relatedness do depend on a notion of physiological reproduction. Her innovative analysis includes a discussion of the advent of assisted reproductive techn.

Author : Joanna Radin
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022644824X
Total Pages : 318 pages
Book Rating : 4.44/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Life on Ice written by Joanna Radin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-03-27 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the atomic bombing at the end of World War II, anxieties about survival in the nuclear age led scientists to begin stockpiling and freezing hundreds of thousands of blood samples from indigenous communities around the world. These samples were believed to embody potentially invaluable biological information about genetic ancestry, evolution, microbes, and much more. Today, they persist in freezers as part of a global tissue-based infrastructure. In Life on Ice, Joanna Radin examines how and why these frozen blood samples shaped the practice known as biobanking. The Cold War projects Radin tracks were meant to form an enduring total archive of indigenous blood before it was altered by the polluting forces of modernity. Freezing allowed that blood to act as a time-traveling resource. Radin explores the unique cultural and technical circumstances that created and gave momentum to the phenomenon of life on ice and shows how these preserved blood samples served as the building blocks for biomedicine at the dawn of the genomic age. In an era of vigorous ethical, legal, and cultural debates about genetic privacy and identity, Life on Ice reveals the larger picture—how we got here and the promises and problems involved with finding new uses for cold human blood samples.

Author : Sophia Roosth
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022644063X
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.37/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Synthetic written by Sophia Roosth and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-03-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the final years of the twentieth century, émigrés from engineering and computer science devoted themselves to biology and resolved that if the aim of biology is to understand life, then making life would yield better theories than experimentation. Armed with the latest biotechnology techniques, these scientists treated biological media as elements for design and manufacture: viruses named for computers, bacterial genomes encoding passages from James Joyce, chimeric yeast buckling under the metabolic strain of genes harvested from wormwood, petunias, and microbes from Icelandic thermal pools. In Synthetic: How Life Got Made, cultural anthropologist Sophia Roosth reveals how synthetic biologists make new living things in order to understand better how life works. The first book-length ethnographic study of this discipline, Synthetic documents the social, cultural, rhetorical, economic, and imaginative transformations biology has undergone in the post-genomic age. Roosth traces this new science from its origins at MIT to start-ups, laboratories, conferences, and hackers’ garages across the United States—even to contemporary efforts to resurrect extinct species. Her careful research reveals that rather than opening up a limitless new field, these biologists’ own experimental tactics circularly determine the biological features, theories, and limits they fasten upon. Exploring the life sciences emblematic of our time, Synthetic tells the origin story of the astonishing claim that biological making fosters biological knowing.

Author : Stefan Helmreich
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 140087386X
Total Pages : 325 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Sounding the Limits of Life written by Stefan Helmreich and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-27 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is life? What is water? What is sound? In Sounding the Limits of Life, anthropologist Stefan Helmreich investigates how contemporary scientists—biologists, oceanographers, and audio engineers—are redefining these crucial concepts. Life, water, and sound are phenomena at once empirical and abstract, material and formal, scientific and social. In the age of synthetic biology, rising sea levels, and new technologies of listening, these phenomena stretch toward their conceptual snapping points, breaching the boundaries between the natural, cultural, and virtual. Through examinations of the computational life sciences, marine biology, astrobiology, acoustics, and more, Helmreich follows scientists to the limits of these categories. Along the way, he offers critical accounts of such other-than-human entities as digital life forms, microbes, coral reefs, whales, seawater, extraterrestrials, tsunamis, seashells, and bionic cochlea. He develops a new notion of "sounding"—as investigating, fathoming, listening—to describe the form of inquiry appropriate for tracking meanings and practices of the biological, aquatic, and sonic in a time of global change and climate crisis. Sounding the Limits of Life shows that life, water, and sound no longer mean what they once did, and that what count as their essential natures are under dynamic revision.

Author : Sandra Bamford
Publisher : Berghahn Books
ISBN 13 : 0857456393
Total Pages : 301 pages
Book Rating : 4.97/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Kinship and Beyond written by Sandra Bamford and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The genealogical model has a long-standing history in Western thought. The contributors to this volume consider the ways in which assumptions about the genealogical model--in particular, ideas concerning sequence, essence, and transmission--structure other modes of practice and knowledge-making in domains well beyond what is normally labeled "kinship." The detailed ethnographic work and analysis included in this text explores how these assumptions have been built into our understandings of race, personhood, ethnicity, property relations, and the relationship between human beings and non-human species. The authors explore the influences of the genealogical model of kinship in wider social theory and examine anthropology's ability to provide a unique framework capable of bridging the "social" and "natural" sciences. In doing so, this volume brings fresh new perspectives to bear on contemporary theories concerning biotechnology and its effect upon social life.

Author : Warwick Anderson
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421433613
Total Pages : 349 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Collectors of Lost Souls written by Warwick Anderson and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2019-08-27 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This riveting account of medical detective work traces the story of kuru, a fatal brain disease, and the pioneering scientists who spent decades searching for its cause and cure. Winner, William H. Welch Medal, American Association for the History of Medicine Winner, Ludwik Fleck Prize, Society for Social Studies of Science Winner, General History Award, New South Wales Premier's History Awards When whites first encountered the Fore people in the isolated highlands of colonial New Guinea during the 1940s and 1950s, they found a people in the grip of a bizarre epidemic. Women and children succumbed to muscle weakness, uncontrollable tremors, and lack of coordination, until death inevitably supervened. Facing extinction, the Fore attributed their unique and terrifying affliction to a particularly malign form of sorcery. In The Collectors of Lost Souls, Warwick Anderson tells the story of the resilience of the Fore through this devastating plague, their transformation into modern people, and their compelling attraction for a throng of eccentric and adventurous scientists and anthropologists. Battling competing scientists and the colonial authorities, the brilliant and troubled American doctor D. Carleton Gajdusek determined that the cause of the epidemic—kuru—was a new and mysterious agent of infection, which he called a slow virus (now called a prion). Anthropologists and epidemiologists soon realized that the Fore practice of eating their loved ones after death had spread the slow virus. Though the Fore were never convinced, Gajdusek received the Nobel Prize for his discovery. Now revised and updated, the book includes an extensive new afterword that situates its impact within the fields of science and technology studies and the history of science. Additionally, the author now reflects on his long engagement with the scientists and the people afflicted, describing what has happened to them since the end of kuru. This astonishing story links first-contact encounters in New Guinea with laboratory experiments in Bethesda, Maryland; sorcery with science; cannibalism with compassion; and slow viruses with infectious proteins, reshaping our understanding of what it means to do science.

Author : Helen Anne Curry
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 131651031X
Total Pages : 683 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Worlds of Natural History written by Helen Anne Curry and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-22 with total page 683 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the development of natural history since the Renaissance and contextualizes current discussions of biodiversity.

Author : Gisli Palsson
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107085845
Total Pages : 233 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Nature, Culture and Society written by Gisli Palsson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reflecting upon the changing human condition, Palsson addresses various conflated zones of life at particular times and scales. Engaging with topical issues on the public agenda, from personal genomics to human-animal relations to the global environment, the book sets out a compelling case for meaningful change.

Author : Alice Street
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 0822376660
Total Pages : 416 pages
Book Rating : 4.68/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Biomedicine in an Unstable Place written by Alice Street and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-24 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biomedicine in an Unstable Place is the story of people's struggle to make biomedicine work in a public hospital in Papua New Guinea. It is a story encompassing the history of hospital infrastructures as sites of colonial and postcolonial governance, the simultaneous production of Papua New Guinea as a site of global medical research and public health, and people's encounters with urban institutions and biomedical technologies. In Papua New Guinea, a century of state building has weakened already inadequate colonial infrastructures, and people experience the hospital as a space of institutional, medical, and ontological instability. In the hospital's clinics, biomedical practitioners struggle amid severe resource shortages to make the diseased body visible and knowable to the clinical gaze. That struggle is entangled with attempts by doctors, nurses, and patients to make themselves visible to external others—to kin, clinical experts, global scientists, politicians, and international development workers—as socially recognizable and valuable persons. Here hospital infrastructures emerge as relational technologies that are fundamentally fragile but also offer crucial opportunities for making people visible and knowable in new, unpredictable, and powerful ways.