GES Center Lectures, NC State University Genetic Engineering and Society Center, NC State

Final GES Colloquium podcast of Spring 2024

Investigating the societal and ethical implications of synthetic cells
Barbara Herr Harthorn, PhD, Research Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Barbara

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This talk introduces 3 ongoing NSF-funded collaborative interdisciplinary projects investigating US public and expert views on bottom-up synthetic cells using a responsible research and innovation framework.

Abstract
Based on three collaborative interdisciplinary research projects on bottom synthetic cells in development in the US on which she is PI, this paper presents an overview of findings on diverse publics’ perceptions of the benefits and risks of new syn cells and some of the main drivers of these views. The research uses a mixed qualitative and quantitative methodological toolkit based on semi-structured interviews, a large representative national survey, and public deliberations. Professor Harthorn examines the range and nuances of public views on these in-the-making science and engineering innovations and promises of enchanted futures, evolution-defying bioengineered life, and economic benefits. In spite of enduring techno-optimism, U.S. publics’ concerns center on the role of such technologies in accelerating economic and social inequalities and injustice. The project also explores public perceived boundaries between living/nonliving, perceived characteristics of life, and other factors that differentiate syn cell perceptions from those of other emerging technologies. The implications of these findings for technological governance and participatory democracy will be discussed.

Speaker Bio
Barbara Herr Harthorn is Professor Emerita and Research Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She is a medical, cultural, and psychological anthropologist whose research for the past 2 decades has focused on risk perception and public deliberation on societal and ethical aspects of new technologies, including nanotechnologies, fracking, and, currently, synthetic biology/synthetic cells. She served as founding Director and PI of the NSF national center, NSEC: Center for Nanotechnology in Society at the University of California at Santa Barbara (CNS-UCSB) from 2005-2017. In the CNS, she led international, interdisciplinary teams using mixed social science research methods to study risk and benefit perception regarding new technologies among experts and lay publics in the US and abroad. Since 2019, she has been conducting research on public and expert perceptions of synthetic biology and bottom-up synthetic cells within a responsible research and innovation framework. Dr. Harthorn’s publications include The Social Life of Nanotechnology (2012, Routledge, with John Mohr) and Risk, Culture & Health Inequality: Shifting Perceptions of Danger and Blame (2003, Greenwood/Praeger, with Laury Oaks) and numerous chapters, reports, and articles in risk analysis, social science, science and technology studies, science policy, environmental science, and nanoscience journals. She has given invited expert testimony on science in society issues to the US Congressional National Nanotechnology Caucus, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), the NAS, the US National Nanotechnology Initiative, the US Multi-Agency group on Synthetic Biology, and the European Commission, among many others. Her past work included over a decade of research on Latina/o farmworker health and risk perceptions in California. She is an elected Fellow of the American Anthropological Association, the Society for Applied Anthropology, and the AAAS.

GES Colloquium is jointly taught by Drs. Jen Baltzegar and Dawn Rodriguez-Ward, who you may contact with any class-specific questions. The Podcast is produced by Patti Mulligan. Colloquium will be held in person in the 1911 Building, room 129, and live-streamed via Zoom.

Please subscrib

Gene technology in aquaculture: Potential, constraints, and first products to commercialization
Eric Hallerman, PhD, Emeritus Professor, Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation, Virginia Tech University
While aquaculture biotechnology has the potential to improve the sustainability of aquaculture, its realization will depend upon enabling public policy.

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Abstract
Aquaculture products are important to human nutrition, especially in developing countries. To meet growing global demand, aquaculture must improve production systems and farmed stocks, the latter using both selective breeding and gene technology. Fishes are excellent systems for gene technology, and numerous transgenic and gene-edited lines have been developed. While there has been considerable R&D, there has been little penetration of the marketplace. The reasons for this will be considered, with a case study focusing on the development and regulatory oversight of the AquAdvantage Atlantic salmon, the first genetically modified animal approved for use as food globally. Two gene-edited marine fishes have been approved for sale in Japan. Will other animal products of gene technology be approved? To realize the benefits of animal biotechnology, we will need not just innovation, but also enabling regulation creating a pathway to the market, and engagement with the private and NGO sectors and the public.

Related links:


Heritable Genetic Modification in Food Animals, NASEM
SAAA Animal Biotechnology Resources: https://www.isaaa.org/kc/proceedings/animalbiotechnology
Hallerman, E., J. Bredlau, L.S. Camargo, et al. 2024. Enabling regulatory policy globally will promote realization of the potential of animal biotechnology. CABI Agriculture and Life Sciences, 5: 25. https://doi.org/10.1186/s43170-024-00221-6. PDF

Speaker Bio
Eric Hallerman is a recently retired Professor of Fish Conservation at Virginia Tech University and is currently serving as the Chair of the ad hoc committee appointed by the National Academies to explore heritable genetic modifications of food animals. His research has included conservation genetics of fishes and mollusks, aquaculture genetics, and aquaculture biotechnology and policy. He has done research on gene transfer in fish, effective confinement of aquaculture species, ecological risk assessment for genetically modified fish, and related public policies. He has done such work with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and several NGOs. He has served on several committees of the National Academy of Sciences with mandates in these areas and organized several international workshops on animal biotechnology policy.


GES Colloquium is jointly taught by Drs. Jen Baltzegar and Dawn Rodriguez-Ward, who you may contact with any class-specific questions. The Podcast is produced by Patti Mulligan. Colloquium will be held in person in the 1911 Building, room 129, and live-streamed via Zoom.

Please subscribe to the GES newsletter and LinkedIn for updates.

Genetic Engineering and Society Center
Colloquium Home | Zoom Registration | Watch Colloquium Videos | LinkedIn | Newsletter

GES Center at NC State University—Integrating scientific knowledge & diverse public values in shaping the futures of biotechnology.

Find out more at https://ges-center-lectures-ncsu.pinecast.co

How essences distort our understanding of genes: Implications for eugenics and GMO attitudes
Steven Heine, PhD, Professor of Cultural & Social Psychology, University of British Columbia
Profile | @StevenHeine4
How psychological biases of essentialism distort the ways people understand genetics, eugenics, and GMO products.

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Abstract
People the world over are essentialist thinkers – they are attracted to the idea that hidden essences make things as they are. And because genetic concepts remind people of essences, they tend to think of genes in ways similar to essences. That is, people tend to think about genetic causes as immutable, deterministic, natural, and they create homogenous and discrete groups. I will discuss the results of a number of psychological experiments that reveals how people’s essentialist biases distort the way that they understand genetic causes. In particular, I’ll discuss the relationships between essentialist thinking, eugenic beliefs, and attitudes towards GMO products.

Related links:


DNA Is Not Destiny: The Remarkable, Completely Misunderstood Relationship between You and Your Genes, Steven Heine

Speaker Bio
Steven J. Heine is a Professor of Social and Cultural Psychology and a Distinguished University Scholar at the University of British Columbia. After receiving his PhD from the University of British Columbia in 1996, he had visiting positions at Kyoto University and Tokyo University, and was on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania before returning to British Columbia. Heine has published several dozen journal articles in such periodicals as Science, Nature, and Behavioral and Brain Sciences He has authored the best-selling textbook in its field, entitled “Cultural Psychology,” and has written a trade book called “DNA is not Destiny.” Heine has received numerous international awards and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Heine’s research focuses on a few topics that converge on how people come to understand themselves and their worlds. One of his main projects, which is the topic of his presentation, focuses on genetic essentialism, which explores how people make sense of genetic ideas. Quite typically, people have an overly fatalistic understanding about how genes influence their lives. For example, he finds that when people learn that genes relate to their risk for obesity they subsequently tend to eat more junk food, as they feel that their weight is beyond their control. He has explored how people’s essentialist views of genetics affects their support for eugenics and GMO products.


GES Colloquium is jointly taught by Drs. Jen Baltzegar and Dawn Rodriguez-Ward, who you may contact with any class-specific questions. The Podcast is produced by Patti Mulligan. Colloquium will be held in person in the 1911 Building, room 129, and live-streamed via Zoom.

Please subscribe to the GES newsletter and LinkedIn for updates.

Genetic Engineering and Society Center
Colloquium Home | Zoom Registration | Watch Colloquium Videos | LinkedIn | Newsletter

GES Center at NC State University—Integrating scientific knowledge & diverse public values in shaping the futures of biotechnology.

Find out more at https://ges-center-lectures-ncsu.pinecast.co

Eugenics and the Welfare State in North Carolina +
Anna Krome-Lukens, PhD, Teaching Associate Professor, Public Policy at UNC-Chapel Hill
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In North Carolina, social reformers and welfare officials relied on eugenics ideology as they built the welfare state before the New Deal, with lasting effects for our contemporary definitions of citizenship.

Abstract
Between 1929 and 1977, North Carolina officials approved the surgical sterilization of over 7,600 people under the aegis of the state’s eugenics program. To help explain the persistence of this program, I turn to its roots, since rationales for eugenics offered in the first three decades of the twentieth century shaped the course of the program for years to come. In this talk, I analyze the growing appeal of eugenics to influential white North Carolinians who debated and promoted eugenics from 1900 onward. These social reformers honed their ideas about eugenic fitness and the need to preserve the Anglo-Saxon race while they built a statewide social welfare apparatus. Their statewide grid of welfare offices later became the basis for distribution of New Deal funds.

In building this statewide welfare system, reformers and social workers eagerly explored eugenics as a solution to social problems, then refashioned and interpreted eugenic principles for a broader audience. They linked principles of eugenics to ideas that already had broad support among white middle-class North Carolinians, including Christian charity, racial segregation, and a celebration of the state’s Anglo-Saxon heritage. They also relied on eugenics-inspired metaphors to rationalize the unequal distribution of welfare services, giving new force and apparent scientific legitimacy to longstanding prejudices about the undeserving poor. They trained a new generation of professional social workers to see eugenically “unfit” people as undeserving of social services, and they promised that segregation and sterilization would curb the costs of social welfare programs. Ultimately, North Carolina’s white social reformers built eugenics-inspired ideas of racialized fitness and restrictive definitions of citizenship into our contemporary institutions.

Speaker Bio
Anna Krome-Lukens completed her Ph.D. in U.S. History at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on the history of social welfare and public health policies, particularly the history of North Carolina’s eugenics and social welfare programs in the early 20th century. Anna is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Reform and Regeneration: Eugenics and the Welfare State in the South, which demonstrates the lasting influence of eugenics in shaping welfare policies and conceptions of citizenship. She directs UNC’s Public Policy Capstone Program and also teaches first-year courses on higher education and food policy.

GES Colloquium is jointly taught by Drs. Jen Baltzegar and Dawn Rodriguez-Ward, who you may contact with any class-specific questions. The Podcast is produced by Patti Mulligan. Colloquium will be held in person in the 1911 Building, room 129, and live-streamed via Zoom.

Please subscribe to the GES newsletter and LinkedIn for updates.

Genetic Engineering and Society Center
Colloquium Home | Zoom Registration | Watch Colloquium Videos | LinkedIn | Newsletter

GES Center at NC State University—Integrating scientific knowledge & diverse public values in shaping the futures of biotechnology.

Find out more at https://ges-center-lectures-ncsu.pinecast.co

Caring for the Enemy, Killing the Ally: The More-than-Human Politics of Transgenic Mosquitoes in Brazil
Luisa Reis-Castro, PhD, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Southern California
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This talk, based on ethnographic research with scientists and technicians working with transgenic mosquitoes in Brazil, examines the class, gender, and regional issues present in the efforts to transform the mosquito from a “problem” into a “solution.”

Abstract
The Aedes aegypti mosquito, known as the vector for Zika, dengue, chikungunya, and yellow fever viruses, has historically been targeted by public health campaigns as an enemy to be eliminated. However, new strategies, such as the transgenic approach, biologically modify the A. aegypti so that they can be deployed to control their own population—here, mosquito breeding and mating are operationalized as an insecticide. In this case, the insect must be simultaneously a friend and an enemy, cared for and killed, and it must establish encounters and nonencounters.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at a “biofactory” in the northeast of Brazil dedicated to mass-producing these transgenic mosquitoes, this article investigates the new forms of labor and value produced through these contrasting human-mosquito relations. The author also examines how the project is implemented within the broader geopolitics of experimentation and more-than-human gendered conceptions. Analyzing the multispecies relationships engendered under the premise that it is possible to produce nonencounters, she identifies the historical conditions and promissory claims of transforming the A. aegypti ’s reproductive capacity into labor for killing. Such recasting yields what the author calls the “nonencounter value” within the scientific remaking of mosquitoes, their becoming and being.

Related links:


Luísa Reis-Castro; Becoming Without: Making Transgenic Mosquitoes and Disease Control in Brazil. Environmental Humanities 1 November 2021; 13 (2): 323–347. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9320178. PDF
Video: Haedes & Aegypta e a abordagem da Oxitec (Anthropomophized mosquitoes depicting the male as a hero and the female as the villain)

Speaker Bio
Dr. Luísa Reis-Castro is an Assistant Professor in Anthropology. Reis-Castro’s research broadly explores the social, cultural, political, and historical dimensions of scientific knowledge about human-animal relations, particularly when harm to humans is involved, as seen with mosquitoes transmitting pathogens. Her first project investigates techno-scientific projects in Brazil that, rather than fight against the Aedes aegypti mosquito, work to harness the insect to tackle the viruses it is known to transmit (Zika, dengue, chikungunya, and yellow fever). By using ethnographic and historical research methods, she explores what these projects can tell us about the geopolitics of knowledge production in an interdependent, unequal world increasingly affected by human activity. She received her PhD from the Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

GES Colloquium is jointly taught by Drs. Jen Baltzegar and Dawn Rodriguez-Ward, who you may contact with any class-specific questions. Colloquium will be held in person in the 1911 Building, room 129, and live-streamed via Zoom. Please subscribe to the GES newsletter and LinkedIn for updates.

Genetic Engineering and Society Center
Colloquium Home | Zoom Registration | GES Video Library | @GESCenterNCSU | Newsletter

GES Center at NC State University—Integrating scientific knowledge & diverse public values in shaping the futures of biotechnology.

Local seeds and global needs: Ethnobotany, agroecology, and the history of in situ conservation of agrobiodiversity
Helen Anne Curry, PhD, Melvin Kranzberg Professor in the History of Technology, Georgia Institute of Technology
Website | @TechHSOC
This talk will explore how insights from Indigenous agricultural practices, both past and present, can inform global efforts to conserve diverse crop varieties and bridge the gap between local practices and broader sustainability goals.

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Abstract
For decades, diverse disciplines like ethnobotany, agroecology, and agricultural anthropology have strived to understand the agricultural practices of Indigenous peoples. Since the 1980s, this research has frequently been intertwined with conservation efforts. For example, it has promoted local farming methods and tools as ways to maintain biodiverse forests and prevent soil erosion.
In this presentation, Dr. Curry digs into the future influence of research on Indigenous agriculture on the preservation of global crop diversity. She examines how social scientists have constructed new narratives about the past and present of Indigenous cultivation. These narratives then inform arguments about the most desirable agricultural futures, both within and beyond Indigenous communities.
Typically, these accounts of past and future agriculture have focused on specific crop varieties: locally adapted plants believed to be traditionally cultivated but now endangered by agricultural intensification. Consequently, the research of ethnobotanists and agroecologists has fueled new interest in and approaches to protecting these varieties, ultimately forging a lasting connection between local cultivation practices and global conservation concerns.

Related links:


From Collection to Cultivation: Historical Perspectives on Crop Diversity and Food Security

Speaker Bio
Dr. Helen Anne Curry is Melvin Kranzberg Professor in the History of Technology at the School of History and Sociology, Georgia Institute of Technology. She is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, where she leads the multi-researcher project, “From Collection to Cultivation: Historical Perspectives on Crop Diversity and Food Security,” with funding from the Wellcome Trust. Her current research centers on the histories of seeds, crop science, and industrial agriculture. She is the author of Evolution Made to Order: Plant Breeding and Technological Innovation in Twentieth Century America (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and Endangered Maize: Industrial Agriculture and the Crisis of Extinction (University of California Press, 2022).


GES Colloquium is jointly taught by Drs. Jen Baltzegar and Dawn Rodriguez-Ward, who you may contact with any class-specific questions. Colloquium will be held in person in the 1911 Building, room 129, and live-streamed via Zoom.
Please subscribe to the GES newsletter and LinkedIn for updates.

Genetic Engineering and Society Center
Colloquium Home | Zoom Registration | GES Video Library | @GESCenterNCSU | Newsletter

GES Center at NC State University—Integrating scientific knowledge & diverse public values in shaping the futures of biotechnology.

Find out more at https://ges-center-lectures-ncsu.pinecast.co