Event overview
Priska Gisler delivers a seminar in the CSISP "What is Medicine?" series
Collecting practices in the field have long been treated as self-evident preconditions for biomedical research. However, the contemporary world of hospitals and clinical research is heavily dependent on collections of biological materials from plants, animals and humans. The horseshoe crab serum for example is used in the Limulus Amebocyte Lysate Test checking for endotoxins in drugs, biological products and medical devices.
According to Haraway, myths in the realms of the normal and the pathological entwine around the immune system contributing to determine the limits of the self. Based on this assumption, I will follow Mabel Boyden, a biologist and custodian at Rutgers University’s Serological Museum, on a trip to collect the blood of the horseshoe crab. Her account appeared 1967 in the Bulletin of the Museum and entailed ‘speech figures’ and ‘myths’ (Haraway, 1995) that were as much constitutive as they were descriptive for the immunological discourse of her time. While her narrative of the expedition was dedicated to ‘knowing and following the rules’, ‘to be ready for the crabs’ and to ‘the work of the day’, it offers insight into how the limits between animals and humans, between science and nature, between the self and the other were negotiated in the mid 1960s – a time that was coined by a turn of the biological sciences towards the molecular level of the living things.
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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13 May 2009 | 4:00pm - 6:00pm |
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