In 2012, I wrote The Cosmopolitanization of Science in which the Chinese life science community’s increasing engagement with global research and policy discussions was used to demonstrate a new era of North-South collaborations in identifying and responding to risks. In 2021, as China tries to stall WHO’s investigation on COVID-19’s origins, one may lament that, perhaps ‘cosmopolitan science’ is
My engagement with the Covid origins question began in early January of 2020, when my network of biodefence experts, policymakers and practitioners began exchanging notes on the ‘mysterious lung infection’ in Wuhan. A naturally suspicious group, it wasn’t long before questions were privately raised about potential accidental or deliberate origins. This wasn’t conspiratorial. …
Scientists have pursued the origins of Covid-19 from the very beginning of the pandemic. In February 2020 the Wuhan Institute of Virology, one of China’s top virus laboratories, published research comparing the SARS-Cov-2 virus to a range of other coronaviruses held in their own collection. Based on the phylogenetic comparison of genome sequences, the Wuhan Institute found …
The debate on the origin of the virus causing Covid-19 has so far been framed in terms of a failure of biosecurity: it balances the risk of buying live animals in a wet market against the risk of studying zoonotic viruses in a laboratory. As such, it may at first appear to replicate debates that occurred around artificial mutation (or …
This article is part of the following series: Book forum
Michelle Murphy’s The Economization of Life (Duke University Press, 2017) received the Ludwik Fleck Prize from the the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) at the 2019 conference in New Orleans. Murphy’s book, recognized for its novelty, scholarly excellence, and contribution to science and technology studies, was also the subject of a panel of feminist thinkers who offered commentary …
The COVID-19 pandemic has had significant political, social, and economic effects across the globe, including in Denmark. In response to the pandemic, the Danish government, as one of the first countries in Europe and indeed the world, decided to close its borders, lockdown public institutions, and ban gatherings over ten people, among other “social distancing” measures. Like elsewhere in …