Bard College Berlin Presents

Genes, Patents, Privacy, and Race: Germany vs. the USA

Molecular biology has been critical to the biotech industry for over forty years with the United States and Germany playing key roles in its development. These two countries, however, have rather divergent views on the ethical, social, and legal implications of genomic research. Myles Jackson will contrast various social aspects of genomics research in the two countries including gene patenting and intellectual property, genetic privacy, and the so-called biology of race. He will explain how science policy has been shaped by history and how academics can play a role in forging an ethical policy that does not discredit the scientific enterprise.

Myles W. Jackson is the Albers-Schönberg Professor in the History of Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He has authored over 50 articles on the history, philosophy, and sociology of science and technology from 1750 to the present. He has also authored numerous books including Spectrum of Belief: Joseph von Fraunhofer and the Craft of Precision Optics (MIT Press, 2000), translated into German, Fraunhofers Spektren: Die Präzisionsoptik als Handwerkskunst (Wallstein Verlag, 2007), which won the Paul Bunge Prize of the German Chemical Society for the best work on the history of scientific instruments in 2005 and the Hans Sauer Prize for the best work on the history of inventors and inventions in 2007. In addition, he wrote Harmonious Triads: Physicists, Musicians, and Instrument Makers in Nineteenth-Century Germany (MIT Press, 2006, paperback 2008), and The Genealogy of a Gene: Patents, HIV/AIDS, and Race (MIT Press in 2015, paperback 2017). He has co-edited a collection of essays entitled Music, Sound, and the Laboratory (University of Chicago Press, 2013), and he is the editor of Perspectives on Science: Gene Patenting (MIT Press, 2015).  His most recent monograph, tentatively entitled Engineering Fidelities: Early German Radio, the Trautonium, and Musical Aesthetics, is forthcoming with Princeton University Press in 2024.

Jackson was elected member of the Erfurt Academy of Sciences in 2009, of the German National Academy of Sciences - Leopoldina in 2011, a member of the Académie Internationale d'Histoire des Sciences in 2012, and acatech, the German Academy of Engineering in 2023. He was the recipient of an Alexander-von-Humboldt Fellowship in 1999-2000, and in 2010, he received the Francis Bacon Prize for Contributions to the History of Science and Technology from Caltech, where he was the Francis Bacon Visiting Professor of History of Science and Technology in 2012. In 2014 he received the Reimar Lüst/Humboldt Prize of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and was named Bosch Public Policy Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. In the academic year 2016-17, Jackson was also a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg (Institute for Advanced Study) in Berlin. 

Response and moderation by Tarek Ibrahim (Lecturer, NYU Berlin).

Please register here. Kindly note that seating is limited.

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For more information, e-mail [email protected],
or visit https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1r72XtQGyKSmGsDwxGyN2C5rhuD6GM9pyFP2Fap7Mqr4/.

Time: 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm CET/GMT+1

Location: Lecture Hall, Platanenstraße 98A, 13156 Berlin

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