Transgene

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The Covid-19 pandemic substantially halted the dissemination activities of the TRANSGENE project. With the exception of some online events, most academic conferences were either cancelled or postponed until travel and lockdown restrictions were eased. Our research work, however, continued as we switched our oral histories online and devised mechanisms to get remote access to archives – the latter with the invaluable help of colleagues based in the same city where the archival sources were. As a result of this, we are now presenting the results of the project at two major international conferences, still held online.

Last 8th October, we participated in an open panel at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S). It was organised by colleagues from the University of Lausanne and explored the practices of “data-basing biomedicine.” Our paper explored how the affordances and limitations of the yeast, human and pig reference genomes were shaped by the different involvement of communities in its mapping and sequencing projects. Mechanisms of including some scientific groups and sidelining others throughout the history of the projects resulted in different ideas about what the yeast, human and pig genomes could do and what they represented. Our results were shared with Tsvetelina Hristova (Western Sydney University), David Barberá-Tomás, Ingenio (Spanish National Research Council-Universitat Politècnica de València), Ingrid Metzler (University of Vienna) and Kathryne Metcalf (University of California San Diego), who discussed other biomedical data-centric endeavours.

During November, we will participate in the Seminar Series of our host institution (Science, Technology and Innovation Studies, University of Edinburgh) and have co-organised a panel at the History of Science Society (HSS) Annual Meeting. The latter will explore the place of medical genetics in the history of human genomics. We will present our mixed-methods approach and how it reveals multiple strategies of mapping and sequencing human DNA beyond the concerted determination of the reference sequence by the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium. Other panellists are Andrew Hogan (Creighton University) and Rebecca Mueller (University of Pennsylvania), as well as Susan Lindee and Soraya de Chadarevian, who will act as commentator and chair respectively.