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Posted Tue, 12 May 2009 13:32:09
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Reminder and apologies for cross posting:
Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process (CSISP), Goldsmiths
seminar:
Collecting Animals (Blood) for Humans in Medicine: Following A Tale of The
True Blue Blood of the Horseshoe Crab
Priska Gisler, Collegium Helveticum, ETH Zurich and University of Zurich,
Visiting Research Fellow CSISP, Goldsmiths, University of London
Wednesday, 13 May 4 - 6pm
12th floor Warming Tower
Goldsmiths, University of London
Abstract
Collecting practices in the field have long been treated as self-evident
preconditions for biomedical research. However, the contemporary world of
hospitals and clinical research is heavily dependent on collections of
biological materials from plants, animals and humans. The horseshoe crab
serum for example is used in the Limulus Amebocyte Lysate Test checking for
endotoxins in drugs, biological products and medical devices.
According to Haraway, myths in the realms of the normal and the pathological
entwine around the immune system contributing to determine the limits of the
self. Based on this assumption, I will follow Mabel Boyden, a biologist and
custodian at Rutgers University's Serological Museum, on a trip to collect
the blood of the horseshoe crab. Her account appeared 1967 in the Bulletin
of the Museum and entailed 'speech figures' and 'myths' (Haraway, 1995) that
were as much constitutive as they were descriptive for the immunological
discourse of her time. While her narrative of the expedition was dedicated
to 'knowing and following the rules', 'to be ready for the crabs' and to
'the work of the day', it offers insight into how the limits between animals
and humans, between science and nature, between the self and the other were
negotiated in the mid 1960s - a time that was coined by a turn of the
biological sciences towards the molecular level of the living things.
Priska Gisler has been a research fellow at the Collegium Helveticum (a
transdisciplinary institution jointly hold by ETH Zurich and University of
Zurich) since 2003 and is currently directing a research group on the
project "Tracking the Human: Technologies of Collecting, Ordering and
Comparing or The Problem of Relevant Knowledge", and she is also head of the
SNF-funded project "Research in Humans: The genealogy of a law in the
making". She is currently a visiting fellow at CSISP, Goldsmith College.
Enquiries to: Trudi Kent, Department of Sociology, ext. 7707,
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