New TRANSGENE publications across yeast, human and pig
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Two articles and a book chapter arising from the TRANSGENE project are now accepted or published:
- Lowe, J.W.E. (2021) “Adjusting to precarity: how and why the Roslin Institute forged a leading role for itself in international networks of pig genomics research”, The British Journal for the History of Science.
- Szymansky, E.A. (2021) “When Extracting Is Not Subtracting: Accounting for Organism-technologies as Stakeholders in Microbial Resource Extraction through an Experiment in Discursive Biomimicry”, Science, Technology, & Human Values.
- García-Sancho, M. (forthcoming) “Europe and the genome: An overlooked strategy for a translational genomics”, in: Perspectives on the Human Genome Project and Genomics. Donohue, C. & Love, A. C. (eds.). Minneapolis: Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science.
In ‘Adjusting to precarity’, James Lowe extensively draws on archival sources to examine the multiple stressors affecting the Roslin Institute from the 1980s and into the 1990s and beyond, due to changes in funding, policy and organisational arrangements in UK agricultural research. He explores one of the main responses of the Roslin Institute to this situation, the forging of new capabilities and networks around pig genome mapping. This led to Roslin Institute being a pioneer and leader in this field, opening up new opportunities to hedge against the ongoing precarity it faced. As well as being a detailed exposition of institutional change in science, the paper demonstrates the significance of the role of the European Union in the fates of individual institutions and the forging of genomic research in Europe, as well as shedding new light on the history of genomics.
In ‘When Extracting Is Not Subtracting’, Erika Szymanski creatively deploys the analogy of ‘budding’ derived from the reproductive practices of snowflake yeast – that maintains multicellular connections as it buds new individuals – to assess the consequences of the digital extraction of information about organisms. The digital nature of such extractions means that the data and information created constitute an addition or multiplication of resources and meanings rather than the subtraction constitutive of material extraction. However, she shows that such digital extractions reduce the possibility for appreciating the benefits of multispecies dialogues with recalcitrant living organisms independent of the agendas of human biologists that create digital resources reflecting their own dispositions, and not those of the organisms extracted from.
In ‘Europe and the genome: an overlooked strategy for a translational genomics’, Miguel García-Sancho investigates the Human Genome Analysis Programme (HGAP), launched by the European Commission in 1990 to foster transnational, pan-European cooperation around the practices of DNA mapping and sequencing. The HGAP ended up being overshadowed by the determination of the draft reference sequence of the human genome by Celera Genomics and the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium (IHGSC) in their acclaimed, 2001 simultaneous publication. García-Sancho argues that, instead of being evaluated in terms of the aims of these projects and found less productive or successful in comparison, the HGAP should be interpreted in the context of the common research policies in Europe and their effects on the marriage between genomics and the historically preceding field of medical genetics. The HGAP never explicitly sought to fully sequence the human genome and focused instead on producing DNA sequence data for specific, proximate research uses. Understanding the bridging networks that the European effort fostered between producers and users of DNA data may help in better articulating and organising the current objective of improving medical translation in genomics research.