EGENIS seminar: "Haunted by dreams of a Tuscan castle, or conferences as sites of governance" Dr Robert Smith (University of Edinburgh)
Egenis seminar series
Inspired by the incredible diversity of organisms found in the fossil bed of the Burgess Shale, Stephen J. Gould argued for the importance of historical contingency for life on Earth. Synthetic biologists today cite his work to motivate their attempts to construct novel forms of life unconstrained by the contingent processes of evolution. These bold ambitions inevitably give rise to discussions of governance, which in the life sciences usually lead back to the Asilomar meeting on recombinant DNA.
| An Egenis, the Centre for the Study of Life Sciences seminar | |
|---|---|
| Date | 3 February 2025 |
| Time | 15:30 to 17:00 |
| Place | Hybrid |
Event details
In this seminar we explore these conferences as sites of governance for synthetic biology. As well as discussing meetings we have attended, we engage in ‘speculative ethnography’ to imagine what would have happened if we had been invited to the Asilomar meeting in 1975, to an Asilomar-inspired meeting on synthetic genomics that has not yet happened at a castle in Tuscany, as well as a meeting organised by a historian *in* Asilomar on the 50th anniversary of the 1975 conference. Through these examples, we explore how the past haunts the present and future of engineering life. In doing so, we ask if it is possible to create spaces that allow people to gather to discuss developments in the life sciences in ways that do not merely replay the meetings of the past.
Venue: Byrne House, Virtual: via Zoom
Free to attend. Register here
