Endeavour最新文献

In summer 2021, the Virtual History of Science, Technology, and Medicine group hosted two online panels on pseudoscience topics including Flat Earth, Hollow Earth, geohistory, alternate evolution, and forgeries. The panels discussed the roles of such theories in the history of science, as well as the public’s understanding of both history and science.

Hugh Diamond was a psychiatrist, antiquarian, and photographer, who was the first person to take photographs of female asylum patients. These photographs, using the newly invented technology of the camera, were intended to be objective and accurate visual indicators of mental illness. Considering Diamond’s overlapping interests, his project must be understood within the larger cultural and historical context and the tensions inherent in medical photography and portraiture. Despite the goal of capturing “objective, scientific data,” the photographs instead relied on traditional iconography dating back to the Greeks and Middle Ages and can be analyzed from an art historical perspective. As an antiquarian, Diamond collected portraits of his patients just as he collected various other objects. As such, while Diamond may be considered a humanistic leader of the moral treatment movement, his work in capturing these “specimens,” the female patients, reflects a perpetuation of the stigmatization of mental illness to be put on display for the Victorian audience.

Whereas the Human Genome Project was an anthropocentric research endeavour, microbiome research entails a much more interactive and symbiotic view of human existence, seeing human beings as holobionts, a term coined by Lynn Margulis to emphasise the interconnectedness and multiplicity of organisms. In this paper, building on previous authors, a dialectical perspective on microbiome research will be adopted, striving to supersede the ontological divide between self and other, humans and microbes, and to incorporate the microbiome as a crucial dimension of human existence, not only corporally, but also in terms of mood and cognition. On the practical level, microbiome insights promise to offer opportunities for self-care and self-management, allowing us to consciously interact with our microbiome to foster wellness and health. How to distinguish realistic scenarios from hype? Here again, an interactive (dialectical) approach is adopted, arguing that practices of the self should result from mutual learning between laboratory research and life-world experience.

Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT) is a key mechanism allowing bacteria to enact genetic changes in response to shifting environmental conditions. The swift lateral movement of genes makes possible antibiotic resistance, which is an increasing medical and ultimately cultural problem. There is evidence that HGT also takes place between species. Bacterial DNA appears in the human mitochondrial genome of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) samples. Responding to a recent diagnosis of AML, this creative piece imagines a literary form of HGT. Adjacency is intrinsic to the conceptual and formal concerns of the text. Moving back and forth between essay and poem, between the personal and the planetary, between the real and the imagined, and between the right and left margins of the page, this piece unfolds beside itself, exploring the lateral movement of memory and family history through concerns with antibiotic resistance, illness, writing, and science. While there are no embedded citations or footnotes, a glossary of terms (Appendix 1) follows the main text, and a brief bibliographic essay (Appendix 2) at the end identifies cited sources that correspond to a list of references.

This essay describes my ongoing series “Hypersymbiotics™,” which began in 2012 and explores the potential ways in which our microbiome, genetics, epigenetics and even our environment could potentially be enhanced to turn us into human ‘super-organisms.’ The series includes performances and installations involving BioArt, as well as photographic documentation of ephemeral artworks and takes the form of a vehicle for public discussion about new healthcare technologies. The essay discusses artworks made using synthetic biology techniques including CRISPR genetic modification in bacteria and yeasts, and gene editing in plants, as well as using artificial intelligence and stem cell research. It critiques the role of the media and advertising in the promotion of complex new biomedical technologies. The “Hypersymbiotics™” series is deeply concerned with promoting public understanding of the ethical implications of new scientific developments and enabling reflection and debate. At its core the artwork is about knowledge, power, and control and where that resides.

Recent research about the microbiome points to a picture in which we, humans, are ‘living through’ nature, and nature itself is living in us. Our bodies are hosting—and depend on—the multiple species that constitute human microbiota. This article will discuss current research on the microbiome through the ideas of Japanese ecologist Imanishi Kinji (1902–1992). First, some of Imanishi’s key ideas regarding the world of living beings and multispecies societies are presented. Second, seven types of relationships concerning the human microbiome, human beings, and the environment are explored. Third, inspired by Imanishi’s work, this paper develops the idea of dynamic, porous, and complex multispecies societies in which different living beings or species are codependent on others, including microbiota and human beings.