Transgene

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16/01/2022

Yeast as a model organism at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

As I scuffed my shoes on scattered tree branches, bits of broken asphalt, and varied road debris with fast-moving lorries and sports cars whizzing past my right shoulder, it occurred that one of the principle scientific advantages of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory is isolation.

James Lowe at BSHS
16/01/2022

TRANSGENE on tour

…at the British Society for the History of Science conference

Amongst the sizeable Edinburgh contingent at the annual British Society for the History of Science conference, this year held in York, were representatives from the TRANSGENE project team.
16/01/2022

The unusual pioneer of the Human Genome Project

When we think about prime-movers, proposing for the first time the idea of scientifically tackling the human genome, the usual suspects come to our mind: reputed biomedical Nobel Prize winners such as James Watson, Walter Gilbert or Renato Dulbecco, who formulated their grand idea in the front pages of Science, Nature or other respected journals.
DNA strands
16/01/2022

Advisory Board Meeting and Second Phase of Project

The TRANSGENE team presented its first findings to an Advisory Board comprised by Stephen Hilgartner (Cornell University), Robert Bud (Science Museum, London), Michel Morange (University Paris 6 and Ecole Normale Superieure), Abigail Woods (King’s College, London) and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin).

A person giving a presentation with a projector screen behind
16/01/2022

Exploring pig genetics in France

At the end of November, I followed in the footsteps of many of the pig geneticists whose work I have been researching, and visited the Jouy-en-Josas campus of the French Institut national de la recherche agronomique (INRA), just south of Paris.

a network map
16/01/2022

The Canadian chapter of the history of human genomics

Miguel Garcia-Sancho, PI of the TRANSGENE project and lead investigator of the human genome strand, visited Toronto and Montreal last April to conduct historical research and participate in an interdisciplinary workshop on medical innovation.
14/01/2022

June events

Over June 14th and 15th members of the TRANSGENE team attended a retreat organised by ISSTI, and posed the challenge of investigating multi-domain translation, in which researchers and research organisations work with different industries and stakeholders towards distinctive goals.
The Roslin Institute, near Edinburgh, Scotland
14/01/2022

Classifying people, practices and institutions

Just as classifications of species, genes, stages of development, or macromolecules can shape research in biology, classification in the humanities and social sciences can condition our analyses.
Sequencing the chromosome ends in yeast
14/01/2022

The yeast telomeres

Writing the history of the yeast genome project starting from the end, more precisely the chromosome ends, can be an instructive exercise. Chromosome ends (telomeres) are specialised structures essential for chromosome maintenance and genome stability.
EMBL-EBI, Hinxton, Cambridge
14/01/2022

Collaborating with the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI)

In March 2017, I am conducting a three-week visiting post-doctoral fellowship at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI, Cambridge UK), for the bibliometric and “big data” strand of the project.
network map
14/01/2022

The history of pig genome research enters the matrix

In the TRANSGENE project we are committed to using approaches from different disciplines to make sense of the historical material, and to generate new data from which to form a picture of the genomic research.

Villa Salviati
14/01/2022

Tracing the history of European biotechnology in the HAEU

My week-long visit to the Historical Archives of the European Union (HAEU) in Florence has proved to be a remarkable opportunity for investigating the ‘behind the scenes’ of European biotechnology policies in the 1980s and 1990s.