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Taming microarrays

Avatar for Thomas Söderqvist Thomas Söderqvist

As announced in an earlier post, the third meeting of the Genetics and Medicine Historical Network (GMHN; see more about the network here) organized by pharmaceutical historian Toine Pieters at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam is taking place in sunny Barcelona on 30-31 May. The meeting is about all possible interesting aspects (historical, science studies, ethics, public understanding, etc.) of […]

As announced in an earlier post, the third meeting of the Genetics and Medicine Historical Network (GMHN; see more about the network here) organized by pharmaceutical historian Toine Pieters at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam is taking place in sunny Barcelona on 30-31 May. The meeting is about all possible interesting aspects (historical, science studies, ethics, public understanding, etc.) of the rise of medical genetics and genomics in the last decades.

I’m placed in a double-session, chaired by Ruth Chadwick, called ‘Taming Microarrays’. When I sent in the proposal a couple of months ago, I titled the paper “Microarrays and the Empire/Multitude-distinction: A ‘presence’-approach to the public engagement with microarray technology and SNP genotyping”. Realizing now that this is a ridiculously long and unintelligible title, I think I will change it to something more snappy. Maybe ‘Microchip Museum, Inc.’ will work better? (Got the idea from Paul Werner’s recent book Museum Inc.)  Anyway, a short version of it will appear on this blog within a couple of weeks.
And here’s the full list of papers for the two-day meeting. We’re going to be busy from early morning to late afternoon both days, but since almost everyone in the field will be there, it will definitely be worth the hard work):

  • Celeste Condit (Department of Speech Communication, University of Georgia, USA): From the “Central Dogma” to Gene “Expression”: Materialist Understandings of Human Being
  • Heena Patel, C. Kramer, S. Patel, A. Cashmore (GENIE, University of Leicester, UK): The Sickness of Genes? Exploring the attitudes towards genetics in the community
  • Sophia Vackimes (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Germany): Genetic literacy and dystopian visions
  • K. Mathieson, M. Leech, L. Holmes, J. Ayres (Nowgen, Centre for Genetics in Healthcare, University of Manchester, UK): Dialogue events on genetic medicine
  • Heike Petermann (University of Münster, Germany): Brave New World? Reflections on the role of utopias and their public understanding in the history of human genetics.
  • Matiana González-Silva (Centro de Estudios de Historia de las Ciencias (CEHIC)-Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona): The rhetoric of hope: The promises of the HGP in the Spanish daily press
  • Christian Simon (Bioethics School of Medicine, Case Western Reserve University, USA): No more “gifted” knowledge: African American perspectives on the obligations of genetics researchers to reciprocate data
  • A. Wilde, B. Meiser, PB Mitchell, C Bonfiglioli & PR Schofield (School of Psychiatry, Prince of Wales Clinical School, University of New South Wales, School of Public Health, University of Sydney, and Prince of Wales Medical Research Institute, Sydney, Australia): The impact of news coverage of the genetics of major depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia
  • Arantza Etxeberria Agiriano, Antonio Casado da Rocha (University of the Basque Country, Spain): Ethical challenges of genetic biobanks
  • Victor Rodriguez (TNO Innovation Policy Group, The Netherlands): Is there a failure of concern on modes and impact of material transfer? A review of the empirical evidence
  • Vincenzo Pavone (Institute for public goods, CSIC, Spain): Genetic testing, geneticization and social change
  • Øivind Michelsen (University of Oslo, Norway): Morality of inclusion: reflections on the legitimacy of population structuring by ‘race’ in contemporary medical genetics
  • Vence L. Bonham, S. Sellers, D. Frank (National Human Genome Research Institute (NIH), Bethesda, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA): US Physicians’ attitudes towards race, genetics and clinical medicine
  • Stephen Snelders, Charles D. Kaplan, Frans J. Meijman and Toine Pieters (VU University Medical Centre, Amsterdam, The Netherlands/ University of Houston, USA): Genetics in the doctoring of cancer and alcoholism – Historical lessons on racial and ethnic discrimination
  • María Fernanda Olarte Sierra (Amsterdam School for Social Science Research, The Netherlands): Amniocentesis: A troubled hope (The Columbian experience)
  • Shahid Mahmood Baig, Marriam Bakhtiar (Human Molecular Genetics Laboratory, NIBGE, Faisalabad, Pakistan): Controlling monogenic disorders through cascade testing, prenatal diagnosis and genetic counseling in a highly consanguineous population
  • Martina Cornel, Toine Pieters, Carla van El (VU University Medical Centre, Amsterdam, The Netherlands): Governing the balance between ‘duty to protect’ and ‘right to test’
  • Ilana Löwy (CERMES, Paris, France): Preimplanatory diagnosis and cancer risk
  • Soraya de Chadarevian (UCLA Center for Society and Genetics, LA, USA): Karyotyping human populations in the 1960s
  • María Jesús Santesmases (CSIC, Instituto de Filosofía, Madrid): Establishing karyotypes: from children to fetus, 1966-1976
  • Adam Hedgecoe (Department of Sociology, University of Sussex, UK): Genomic Expectations, Bioethics and the Social Sciences
  • J.H. Fujimura and Ramya Rajagopalan (University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA): Fishin’ Chips: Microarrays as predictive technology in biomedical genomics
  • Bertrand Jordan (Marseille-Nice Genopole, Marseille, France): Why is the adoption of DNA microarrays for clinical diagnostics so slow?
  • Susan Rogers (McGill University, Montreal, Canada): Collaborating on comparability: How standards and regulation sustain microarray experimentation
  • Ellen H.M. Moors and Tilo Propp (Utrecht University, The Netherlands): Genomics based expectations of personalised health: An innovation systems perspective
  • Marianne Boenink, F. Lucivero, T. Swierstra (University of Twente, The Netherlands): An ethics of promising
  • Wieser Bernhard (Inter-University Research Centre for Technology, Work and Culture, University of Klagenfurt, Austria): Guiding public accounts of genetics: a strategic enterprise
  • Xiaomei Zhai (Director of the Department of Social Sciences and Humanities, Peking Union Medical College, China): Public understanding of genetics in China
  • Philippe Mustar, Alberto Cambrosio and Andrei Mogoutov (École des Mines, Paris, France / McGill University, Montreal, Canada / Aguidel, Paris, France): Microarrays as collective innovation
  • Pascale Bourret, Alberto Cambrosio and Peter Keating (UMR 912 INSERM-IRD-Université de la Méditerranée, Marseille, France / McGill University, Montreal, Canada / UQAM, Montreal, Canada): Governing Microarrays
  • Thomas Söderqvist (University of Copenhagen, Denmark): Microarrays and the Empire/Multitude-distinction: A ‘presence’-approach to the public engagement with microarray technology and SNP genotyping
  • Carla van El, Toine Pieters, Martina Cornel (Community Genetics, VU University Medical Centre, Amsterdam, The Netherlands): An unhappy wedding between genetic screening and prevention
  • Neal Holtan (University of Minnesota, Program in the History of Medicine, Minneapolis, USA): Public health genetics in mid-twentieth century Minnesota
  • Peter Harper (Institute of Medical Genetics, Cardiff University, UK): The future of the history of human genetics; the role of archives

For full programme, see also here.