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Mutant words
December 19, 2020
I was listening to the BBC Radio 4 Today programme on this sunny morning of the 19th of December when I heard the phrase ‘mutant strain’, used in reference to a new strain of the SARS-CoV-2 virus which is apparently spreading in the South East. My ears twitched of course, as they did with ‘mutant …
Making Science Public 2020: End of year round-up of blog posts
December 18, 2020
The year began quite innocently, with me blogging, for example, about gene drives. What are gene drives? Who cares about them? And so on. This has now turned into: Who cares? 2020 has been steamrolled by one big event: the Covid-19 pandemic. This meant that many of my posts were devoted to it, that is …
Covid anthropology
December 17, 2020
This is just a quick announcement about an open access triple set of special issues of Anthropology in Action about the new coronavirus and the ways we live now, published by Berghahn, London: “Almost one year into the pandemic the ‘no-touch’ world of COVID-19 is transforming our intimate lives, perhaps permanently in many ways. Edited by Andrew …
Minimal genomes, maximal assumptions
October 23, 2020
This is another guest post by Massimiliano Simons who is a postdoctoral researcher at the department of philosophy and moral sciences at Ghent University. He is also a member of the Working Group on Philosophy of Technology (WGPT) at KU Leuven, Belgium. *** Ten years ago the J. Craig Venter Institute announced the birth of …