BP My career long intellectual interests all cohere around the social, ethical and legal aspects of the emergence of new technologies in the life sciences and the philosophical implications of our ability to engineer and re-engineer life forms, including our own. I have long been fascinated by our ability to re-make nature, and in so doing, to transform key aspects of our collective lived experience: to extend the temporalities of life, re-shape the ‘natural’ parameters of reproduction, manufacture entirely new life forms and bio-informational artefacts; suspend and re-start life at will.
These pre-occupations have taken me into detailed analyses of assisted reproduction, dementia and brain donation, bioinformation and biosurveillance; the commodification of life forms, posthumanism, legal approaches to the regulation of nature, and the public understanding of science. My interest in all things cryo is also long standing. It began with early papers on the role of cryo as a central facilitative technology for the emergence of contemporary biomedicine, but has extended beyond that to more specialised investigations into its centrality in assisted reproduction, organ and tissue transplantation, the creation of cell lines and the construction of engineered scaffolds and implants in regenerative medicine.
Intellectually I have benefited enormously from the ability to work in cross disciplinary settings that have supported what, at times, seemed these rather eclectic interests. I completed my PhD at the University of Cambridge in Human Geography in 1997, before taking up Junior and later Senior Research Fellowships at King’s College Cambridge from 1997 – 2004. There I had the privilege of working with leading sociologists, ethicists, anthropologists, historians of science, and neuroscientists including Sarah Franklin, Onora O’Neill, Marilyn Strathern, Simon Schaffer, and Carol Brayne, all of whom played a critical role in refining my thinking on these subjects.
I moved in 2004 to Queen Mary University of London to seriously develop the subdiscipline of bodily biotechnologies with colleagues such as Beth Greenhough and Sarah Whatmore, and in 2012 was appointed as Chair of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College London. There I had the enormous good fortune to work very closely with the eminent British sociologist Nik Rose in setting up a new department of Global Health and Social Medicine. As my work began to align more closely with Science and Technology Studies, I revived my interests in crytechnologies, and in 2015 was invited by my colleagues, and now co PIs, Alexander Friedrich, Suzanna Alpsancar and Stefan Höhne to attend their TechnoSpaces conference, at which we first began the work of theorising the Cryosphere and its related cultures and economies.
As part of my wider service to the academy, I have sat as an elected member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics (2007-2013), as editor of Economy and Society, and as an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts (FRSA).
In my spare time I have also been variously employed as the Head of the School of Global Affairs, and later Vice Principal and Vice President for Service at King’s College London, and most recently as the Executive Dean of the College of Arts and Social Sciences at the Australian National University. In a former life I was also the first female carpenter in the Australian film and television industry working on productions including Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Mad Max 2, Dead Calm, Prisoner Cell Block H, and the opening of the Commonwealth Games.