Themes and readings
Articles are available through electronic reserve (ER) at Fondren library unless
otherwise marked, and may be accessed by going to the reserve desk site on-line,
entering the class name, and clicking on the web address within the individual
title record. The password will be provided in the first days of class. Those
marked (Lexis-Nexis) are on-line in the library “Academic Universe” database
at http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe
(must be accessed on campus). Please make use of the helpful librarians at Fondren
if you have difficulty using any of these electronic resources. One thing you
should learn from this class is how to take advantage of the library databases
to do research on current events in biotechnology. While it is possible to read
all of these articles on-line, it is required that you print them out
so that you can read them carefully and take notes, and bring them to class
on relevent days, since we will often engage with specific parts of the texts.
Books are available at the reserve desk of Fondren, or in the campus bookstore.
Introduction. Anthropology of Science and Technology
Rudolf Jaenisch, Congressional Testimony on Cloning, 24 January 2002.
Andrew Kimbrell, Congressional Testimony on Cloning, 5 February 2002.
Judy Norsigian, Congressional Testimony on Cloning, 5 March 2002.
Christopher Reeve, Congressional Testimony on Cloning, 7 March 2002.
(Lexis-Nexis, Congressional, search by name under "testimony")
Bruno Latour, "Introduction: Opening Pandora's Box," Science in Action. (ER)
Paul Rabinow, “Severing
the Ties: Fragmentation and Dignity in Late Modernity,” 129-152 in Essays
on the Anthropology of Reason, Princeton University Press, 1996. (ER)
Part I. Origins and Philosophy of Biotechnology
Robert Bud, "Molecular Biology and the Long-Term History of Biotechnology," 3-19 in Arnold Thackray, ed., Private Science: Biotechnology and the Rise of the Molecular Sciences, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. (ER)
Philip Pauly, “Modernist Practice in American Biology,” 272-289 in Dorothy Ross, ed., Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences 1870-1930, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. (ER)
Jacques Loeb, "The
Mechanistic Conception of Life," University of Chicago Press, 1912. (ER)
H.G. Wells, "The Limits of Individual Plasticity," Saturday Review 79:89-90, 1895. (ER)
Literary Experiments
in Biotechnology
H.G. Wells, The Island
of Dr. Moreau, Mass Market Paperback Reprint edition (June 1994), Bantam
Classic and Loveswept. (Bookstore)
Part II. Recombinant
DNA and the Rise of Contemporary Biotechnology
Angela Creager, "Biotechnology and Blood; Edwin Cohn's Plasma Fractionation Project, 1940-1953," 39-62 in Arnold Thackray, ed., Private Science: Biotechnology and the Rise of the Molecular Sciences, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. (ER)
Paul Rabinow, "Toward Biotechnology," 19-45 in Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology, Chicago University Press, 1996. (ER)
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, “Beyond nature and culture: modes of reasoning in the age of molecular biology and medicine,” 19-30 in Margaret Lock, Alan Young and Alberto Cambrosio, eds., Living and Working with the New Medical Technologies, Cambridge University Press, 2000. (ER)
Patenting
Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 447 U.S. 303. (Lexis-Nexis, enter case number after
clicking "get a case")
Daniel Kevles and Ari Berkowitz, "The Gene Patenting Controversy: A Convergence of Law, Economic Interests and Ethics," 67 Brooklyn L. Rev. 233, 2001. (Lexis-Nexis, search by author under the category "legal research" and "law reviews")
Michael Heller and Rebecca Eisenberg, “Can Patents Deter Innovation? The Anticommons in Biomedical Research,” Science 280 (5364):698-701, 1998. http://www.sciencemag.org/ (click “search/science magazine”, enter citation)
Case study 1: Owning
human matter
Lori Andrews, Dorothy Nelkin, Body Bazaar: The Market for Human Tissue in the Biotechnology Age (selections), Crown Publishers, 2001. (ER)
Hannah Landecker, "Between Beneficence and Chattel: The Human Biological in Law and Science," Science in Context 12:203-225, 1999. (ER)
Case study 2: Pharming and cloning
Velander, Lubon, and Drohan, "Transgenic Livestock as Drug Factories," Scientific American, January 1997. (ER)
Sarah Franklin, "Animal Models: an anthropologist considers Dolly," published by the Department of Sociology, Lancaster University at: http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/soc022sf.html
Richard Lewontin, “The Confusion Over Cloning,” 281-310 in It Ain’t Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions, 2nd ed., New York Review of Books, 2001. (ER)
Agriculture and Food
Harmke Kamminga, “Vitamins
and the Dynamics of Molecularization: Biochemistry, Policy and Industry in Britain,
1914-1939,” 83-105 in Chadarevian and Kamminga, eds., Molecularizing Biology
and Medicine, Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998. (ER)
Eric Schlosser, Fast
Food Nation: the Dark Side of the All-American Meal, Houghton Mifflin Company,
2001 (Bookstore)
Case study 3: Genetically Modified Organisms
Belinda Martineau, First Fruit: The Creation of the Flavr Savr Tomato and
the Birth of Biotech Foods, McGraw-Hill Professional Publishing, 2001. (Bookstore)
Jasanoff, "Product, Process, or Programme: Three Cultures and the Regulation of Biotechnology," 311-331 in Resistance to New Technology: Nuclear Power, Information Technology and Biotechnology," edited by Martin Bauer, Cambridge University Press, 1995. (ER)
Biotechnological Culture?
Michael Fortun, Mediated
speculations in the genomics futures markets, New Genetics and Society,
20: 139-156, 2001. (ER)
Skuli Sigurdsson, Yin-yang
genetics, or the HSD deCODE controversy, New Genetics and Society, 20:
103-117, 2001. (ER)
Michael Specter, “Decoding
Iceland,” 40-51, New Yorker Magazine, January 18, 1999. (ER)
Aldous Huxley, Brave
New World, Harperperennial reprint edition, 1998. (Bookstore)