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2012-2013 COLLOQUIUM SERIES
(Click here for 2011-2012 Colloquium Series Archive)
The colloquium on Biological Futures meets throughout the academic year, hosted by the Simpson Center for the Humanities (UW). The format of these colloquia vary: they include guest speakers, panel discussions, and readings-based seminars. We welcome suggestions of focal topics, readings, and speakers (local and visiting). Let us know, too, if you'd like to receive e-mail notices of upcoming colloquia. Please contact:
In 2012-2013 the Biological Futures colloquia will focus on issues central to the Research Ethics Project: what constitutes ethically responsible conduct of research in rapidly evolving fields where the potential benefits and threats include long term, often global social and ecological impacts. Join our panelists and speakers for:
- cross-field comparisons of the ethical challenges posed by innovation and emerging technologies in diverse research fields;
- assessments of how these challenges are understood when considered in terms of different ethical, normative frames;
- reflection on how best to engage these issues, with a focus on what we need to know empirically to address them, and how empirical investigation bears on normative questions about the values that do or should inform our responses to them.
Colloquium Schedule
Spring Quarter 2013
See flyer for Spring Quarter 2013 Colloquium Series
Background reading for the Spring Quarter colloquium series can be found on the following GoPost: https://catalyst.uw.edu/gopost/board/aw26/32579/
Monday, April 29: What Counts as Consent?
12:00 - 1:30 pm, Communications 202
Lunch will be served -- please RSVP to suzelong@uw.edu by Thursday, April 25.
- Panelists: Malia Fullerton (Bioethics and Humanities, UW School of Medicine); Gwen Ottinger (Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, UW Bothell); and Christopher Wade (Nursing and Health Studies, UW Bothell)
- Discussion of consent as the issue arises in the context of managing tissue banks, in engineering and energy extraction, and in personalized medicine.
- See event flyer (.pdf) for more details
- Listen to a podcast (mp3) of the event
Monday, May 6: New Belmont: Knowledge, Power, and the Ethics of Biological Security
12:00 - 1:30 pm, Communications 202
Lunch will be served -- please RSVP to suzelong@uw.edu by Thursday, May 2
- Gaymon Bennett and Roger Brent (Center for Biological Futures, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center) will discuss the implications of a rapidly changing biosecurity landscape in which a growing number of individuals and small groups have the capability to make new replicating organisms. They revisit the monumental 1979 'Belmont Report' on human subjects research and ask what new strategies are needed to understand and address the challenges poased by state-of-the-art biological research.
- See event flyer (.pdf) for more details
- Listen to a podcast (mp3) of the event
Monday, May 20: Stewardship…of what, by whom, in whose interests?
12:00 - 1:30 pm, Communications 202
Lunch will be served -- please RSVP to suzelong@uw.edu by Thursday, May 16.
- Panelists: Steve Gardiner and Lauren Hartzell-Nichols (Philosophy, Program on Values and Program on the Environment); Wylie Burke and Kelly Edwards (Bioethics and Humanities, School of Medicine); Alison Wylie (Philosophy and Archaeology/Anthropology)
- Discussion of stewardship as the issue arises in environmental ethics, biomedical research, and archaeology.
- See event flyer (.pdf) for more details
- Listen to a podcast (mp3) of the event
Winter Quarter 2013
Friday, February 8: Flu Forum: The Ethics and Politics of Influenza Research in a Global Context
2:30 - 4:00 pm, Communications 202
- Moderator: Matt Sparke (Geography, UW)
- Panelists: Rob Wallace (Institute for Global Studies, University of Minnesota); Celia Lowe (Anthropology, UW); Jesse Bloom (Basic Sciences Division, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center); Gaymon Bennett (Center for Biological Futures, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center)
- In September 2011 flu research hit the headlines once again, but not because virus-trackers had identified the threat of a new pandemic. In this case what mobilized anxieties and galvanized debate was the announcement that researchers at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam had successfully engineered a mutant H5N1 virus that was transmissible between mammals. This generated intense debate about the ethics and politics of biomedical research that raises a number of deeply perplexing/perennial problems: Is there research scientists should not undertake? How should such research with dangerous organisms be regulated, and what responsibilities do scientists have to assess and to communicate its risks?
Another broader set of questions comes into sharp focus if experimental virus research is set in the context of the historical geographies in which flu viruses evolve. We juxtapose, in this Flu Forum, close consideration of the ethics and politics of H5N1 research with discussion of the global dynamics, crucially, the global political and economic inequalities, that play a key role in creating the potential for devastating pandemics, and that determine how we respond to these threats.
- See event flyer (.pdf) for more details.
- See PowerPoint slides (.pdf) for Wallace and Bloom
Monday, February 11: Are we researching our way into a deadly pandemic?
Noon - 1:30 pm, Communications 202
- Guest Speaker: Rob Wallace (Institute for Global Studies, University of Minnesota)
- Lunch will be served: please RSVP by Thursday, Feb. 7 to suzelong@uw.edu
- See event flyer (.pdf) for more details.
- See PowerPoint slides (.pdf)
Friday, February 15: Flu Forum II: The H5N1 Research Moratorium Suspended
9:30 - 11:20 am, Denny 211
- A conversation with Roger Brent (Basic Sciences, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center) about the decision to resume transmissibility research and the DHHS Framework for regulating research with highly pathogenic viruses, and about the scientific and governmental contexts for these developments.
- See event flyer (.pdf) for more details.
Thursday, March 7: Ethics from the Bottom-Up: Recursive depth in technosocial networks
4:00 - 5:30 pm, Communications 202
- Guest Speaker: Ron Eglash (Science and Technology Studies, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)
- See event flyer (.pdf) for more details.
Fall Quarter 2012
Mondays, 10:30 - 11:20 am in Mary Gates 271
Biological Futures in a Globalized World is sponsoring "Research Ethics Exposed!" (GenSt 391), a course in which UW Faculty will be giving presentations on ethics issues that are of active concern in cutting edge fields of research in the social and natural sciences. These presentations are all open to the community. See the series flyer (pdf).
September 24: Laura Harkewicz, Biological Futures and the Program on Values
Conflicted Interests: Scientific Uncertainty and Public (Dis)Trust with a Historical Perspective
October 1: Celia Lowe, Anthropology and International Studies
Recognizing Scholarly Subjects: Ethical Issues in Transnational Collaboration
October 8: Tom Ackerman, Atmospheric Sciences; Lauren Hartzell Nichols, Program on Values and Program on the Environment
Ethics Issues in Geo-engineering
October 15: Sara Goering, Philosophy and the Program on Values
Thinking About Neuroethics: Ethics Engagement in the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering
October 22: Gaymon Bennett, Center for Biological Futures, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
The H5N1 Controversy
October 29: Woody Sullivan, Department of Astronomy
Ethical Issues Raised in Astrobiology Concerning the Possibility of Finding Extraterrestrial Life
November 5: Karen Moe, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences (Medical School), and the Director of the Human Subjects Division (Office of Research)
Human Subjects and the IRB Process
November 19: Malia Fullerton, Bioethics and Humanities
From Bench to Bioethics: Grappling With the Implications of Human Genetic Research
November 26: Gwen Ottinger, Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, UW-Bothell
Understanding Emerging Technology: Obligations for Proactive Knowledge Production
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