Sarah S. Richardson
Tuesday, 16 October 2012, 16:00, Large Operon, EMBL Heidelberg
Sarah S. Richardson, Assistant Professor of the History of Science and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality
Race and Gender in a Postgenomic Age
Abstract
What are the implications of the sequencing of the human genome for our conceptions of human racial and gender difference? How does the scientific community respond to controversial research on human differences? In what ways are rapid whole-genome sequencing, the commercial imperatives of much genome science, and the increasingly transdisciplinary nature of genomics changing the context for research on human racial and gender differences? Engaging these questions using recent case studies, this talk examines the historical, social, and philosophical dimensions of emerging genomic research on human difference.
Biography
Sarah S. Richardson is Assistant Professor of the History of Science and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. She received her Ph.D. from the Program in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University. A historian and philosopher of science, her research focuses on race and gender in the biosciences and on the social dimensions of scientific knowledge. Richardson’s forthcoming book, Sex Itself: Male and Female in the Human Genome (Chicago, 2013), traces the history of genetic theories of sex differences from 1900 to the present. Richardson co-edited the book Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age (Rutgers, 2008).