Suchergebnisse

We understand precision medicine as a socio-technical imaginary according to Jasanoff. After briefly outlining how the imaginary of precision medicine emerged from the Human Genome Project and spread across national contexts, we raise the question of why the imaginary and the expectations and promises associated with it persist despite regular disappointment among practitioners about the failure of personalized healthcare. We argue that short-term technological hypes enable stakeholders to renew and maintain the promises of precision medicine. In our view, these hypes are around transformations of a technological assemblage. We discuss this in detail for omics and AI technologies and evaluate the recent transformations in light of the long-term imaginary of precision medicine.

Technologies such as next generation sequencing (NGS) are transforming research fields at the methodological, conceptual, and organizational level. They open up new possibilities and bring with them new commitments and inherent limitations. We show from a philosophy of science perspective how NGS-based metagenomics has transformed microbial ecology and, with it, parts of agricultural soil science, which integrate ecological approaches with the aim to inform agricultural practices. We reconstruct agricultural science as design science (sensu Niiniluoto) and describe how the possibilities, commitments, and limitations of metagenomics approaches in microbial ecology shape values, situation assessments, and recommendations for interventions of soil microbiology in the context of sustainable agriculture.

Any classification rests upon criteria that are used to determine to which class an object belongs, such as morphological characters in the case of biological taxonomy or symptoms in the case of nosology. The workshop will put forward the somewhat neglected question how those criteria are chosen, defined, individuated and represented, with a particular focus on the life sciences. From natural history and medicine to laboratory biology, specific practices have been developed to abstract from particulars to general categories while coping with the intrinsic variability and time dependency of organic beings. The choice of characters can be determined by theoretical, pragmatic or political considerations. Operations that individuate characters can range from descriptive practices and comparative strategies to manipulative procedures. The contributions will focus on practices, representations and conceptual work that are performed in order to obtain and stabilize characters and classes as objects of science. With this focus on characters some general or case specific questions concerning classification can be re-asked, for instance, whether classification constitutes a particular way of knowing, whether it is pragmatic or essentialist, how it modifies identities and power relations and how controversies about classification are settled.Programme 9:30-10:00 Arrival 10:00-11:00 Robert Meunier (ICI Berlin): The Biological Character Concept – Historical Trajectories and Conceptual Distinctions 11:00-12:00 Benjamin Dawson (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar): Hegel and the Rationality of Observation 12:00-13:30 Lunch break 13:30-14:30 Staffan Müller-Wille (University of Exeter, UK): Linnaeus and the Four Corners of the World 14:30-15:30 Mathias Grote (TU Berlin): Microbial Species as Practices – Enrichment Culture, Purification and Microbial Taxonomy Before DNA, c. 1890-1980 15:30-16:00 Coffee Break 16:00-17:00 Lara Keuck (HU Berlin): Disease Classifications as Abstractions in Practice 17:00-18:00 Final discussion ; Characters ...