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Acceleration, autonomy and responsibility
March 18, 2016
In recent emails and meetings there has been a lot of talk about ‘acceleration’, both about the rhetorical use of acceleration in the context of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) and about the reality of living in an accelerated academy. In this post I will examine ‘acceleration’ a bit further, especially in the context of …
The book of life: Reading, writing and editing
November 22, 2015
I have been observing the use of the ‘book of life’ metaphor in genetics and genomics since the year 2000, when it was used to announce that the human genome, our entire DNA, had been roughly sequenced. The Human Genome Project had begun in 1990 and was completed in 2003. Its achievement consisted in finding …
The colours of biotechnology
October 25, 2015
I have recently been musing about images used to make science public and wondered what images are out there for synthetic biology. I knew that in the past cloning was visually represented by ‘Dolly the sheep’ or ‘armies of little Hitlers’, nano found its visual incarnation in nanobots and fantastic voyage, but what images would …