A Simpler Life: Synthetic Biological Experiments
Cornell University Press, 2021. 174 pages.
First, take a self-consciously self-aggrandizing area of bioengineering, “synthetic biology,” which was said to aim at nothing less than “the design and construction of novel life-forms” (Dan-Cohen, p.12), an apparently clear claim made by those with a platform from which to make it, one that is in …
When I began reading Lyle Fearnley’s Virulent Zones: Animal Disease and Global Health at China’s Pandemic Epicenter (2020), I was struck by an isomorphism of our projects in spite of their apparent distance of themes—pandemic prevention and spirit mediumship, which are often rendered, respectively, global and local in scale. But as Fearnley put it in his book: “the pandemic epicenter …
This article is part of the following series: Dispatches from the pandemic
More than a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, the origin of the virus causing the disease remains uncertain. The predominant theory is that its emergence in human populations was the result of zoonotic transmission, via an as-yet to be determined animal host. A competing (if still marginal) theory holds that a more likely source of the initial outbreak was an …
In November, 2015, a group of coronavirus researchers produced a novel, laboratory-made, chimeric virus with the potential to infect human airway cells and cause SARS-like disease. The research elicited a brief moment of controversy that followed a familiar pattern. Critics claimed that the experiment’s primary contribution was to make the world a riskier place. Its defenders did not disagree, …
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
This article is part of the following series: Dispatches from the pandemic
Cover Arrowsmith, Pocket Books, 1944 EditionSinclair Lewis’s novel Arrowsmith, published in 1925 to critical and public acclaim (the book was awarded the Pulitzer prize, although Lewis refused it), is a bildungsroman with an unusual hero: a young doctor cum scientist, Martin Arrowsmith (Lewis, 1925). The hero’s career includes a range of roles and positions: he is at …