Program in History of Science, Princeton University
Organized by: Angela N. H. Creager and Daniel Garber
Times: Friday, February 8, and Saturday, February 9
9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., both days
Place: 211 Dickinson Hall, Princeton University
Registration: Contact Amy Shortt to register for the workshop, including lunches, ashortt@princeton.edu
How has the conception of life related to other convictions and concerns, whether scientific, medical, intellectual, cultural or political? How have technologies and ways of manipulating living materials changed the understanding of life itself? How have the slippages in the meaning of "life" been subversive to, or perhaps generative of, biological knowledge?
Schedule for Friday, February 8
9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Session 1. Life Between Machine and Technology
* Gideon Manning, California Institute of Technology, “Cartesian Anthropocentrism: Why Living Machines Were Different and Why It Mattered”
* Hannah Landecker, Rice University, “Life In Vitro”
* Commentator: John Tresch, University of Pennsylvania
2:30 - 5:30 p.m.
Session 2. Life, Death, and Medicine
* Nancy Siraisi, CUNY, “Human Life Span, Length of Life, and the Powers of Medicine: Some Fourteenth to Early Seventeenth Century Views”
* Domenico Bertoloni Meli, Indiana University, "Experimenting on Live Animals: A Taxonomy of Vivisections in the Seventeenth Century"
* Commentator: Harold Cook, Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, London
[Also see February 9]