SHEILA JASANOFF is Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Previously, she was founding chair of Cornell University’s Department of Science and Technology Studies. At Harvard, she founded and directs the Program on Science, Technology and Society. Jasanoff’s research centers on the interactions of law, science, and politics in democratic societies. She has written more than 100 articles and book chapters and authored or edited more than a dozen books, including The Fifth Branch, Science at the Bar, and Designs on Nature. An edited volume, Dreamscapes of Modernity, was published in 2015. Her newest book, The Ethics of Invention, appeared in 2016.
Jasanoff has held numerous distinguished professorships in the US, Europe, and Japan. She was a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and Karl W. Deutsch Guest Professor at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin. Her awards include a Guggenheim fellowship, the Austrian Government’s Ehrenkreuz, the George Sarton Chair of the University of Ghent, the Bernal award of the Society for Social Studies of Science, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Twente. She is a foreign member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. She holds an A.B. in Mathematics from Harvard College, a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Harvard University, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.
Presentation Abstract
Biomedical Imaginaries: Translational Medicine in Comparative Perspective
Medicine, like many areas of concentrated human endeavor, trades in collective imaginations of desired and attainable futures—or sociotechnical imaginaries. The idea of translation has been central to such future-making in recent years, as policymakers, researchers, clinicians, and patients pin their hopes on the free movement of new knowledge into therapies for ailing bodies or minds. Translation, joined to the metaphors of reading, writing, and editing, stresses the textuality of the scientifically known body in the era of "omics," informatics, and now CRISPR. In this talk, I will use cross-national comparison to restore materiality and contextual thickness to the idea of translation. I will show that biomedical translation creates citizens and subjects along with therapies, and hence is a rich site of co-production.