Mitchellmemo26

3 abstracts

-1 The human and the animal are inherently malleable concepts; in some historical contexts it is the soul that provides separation while in others it is language and so on. The point being it is a concept requiring negotiation. While a notion such as “humanness” operates on a level of common-sense or taken for granted obviousness in most everyday contexts, in a lab in which human and animal stem-cell material are actively mixed, such common sense must be renegotiated and made explicit. What does count, what should count and what are is acceptable when combining human and animal’s “stuff of life.” This anthropological account will provide insight into how the scientists working in such lab think about, understand, and deal with these sorts of classificatory dilemmas.

-2 What goes into a successful scientific endeavor? Surely proper funding and appropriate research design, but what if your science is blocked by particular ethical and political barriers, such as embryonic stem-cell researchers after Bush’s 2001 decision to block funding? Without taking the normative position that any and all “blocked” scientists ought to proceed unperturbed, this paper will take a descriptive, ethnographic look at how scientists in a field faced with widespread public discomfort (in this human-animal embryonic stem-cell research) attempt to “promote” their science and thus become what I refer to as “ethical entrepreneurs.” That is, they as scientists are forced out of the lab in order to create the proper ethical landscape for their research to proceed.

-3 How do scientists at the intersection of a potentially “hopeful” and/or “horrific” science imagine their work? In the case of human-animal embryonic stem-cell research, scientists are caught between several potential futures for their science; one which provides cheap cures for currently incurable debilitating diseases, one in which biotechnology firms gain ever greater control of life down to the tiniest molecular process, and one in which “monsters” roam the world (or any mixture of the three). How, though, do the scientist’s themselves deal with these futures? Does the question of the future occur to them? Do they actively try to shape the future with the decisions they make in their work?