STEM Ed Announcement: ISIS co-sponsored event THIS Sat., May 1 @1:30PM HC, West Lecture

[Morton Sternheim <mort@k12s.phast.umass.edu>]

This is not a UMass Amherst program.
Contact information is below.
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The Institute for Science and Interdisciplinary Studies is proud to 
present an excellent entertaining & informative speaker, ISIS's own 
Founding Fellow, Prof. Mike Fortun. He is returning to Hampshire to 
present the keynote speech of a five college anthropology conference 
Saturday, May 1

"Anthropology & Volatility: deCODE Genetics and Other Icelandic Scandals"
1:30Pm at Hampshire College's East Lecture, in Franklin Patterson Hall

Mike writes:
This presentation uses Iceland's deCODE Genetics as an index of
developments in the science and political economy of genomics, and 
theinternational political economy more broadly, from the late 1990s to 
the present. It begins with deCODE's incorporation in 1996, 
overwhelmingly dependent on a financial promise from primary shareholder 
Hoffmann-La Roche for operating capital, and dependent as well on a 
political alliance that granted deCODE access to the medical records of 
the Icelandic nation.
It follows the resistance of Icelandic physicians and citizens to this
"Health Sector Database" deCODE during what are now called the "grey 
market" years, when deCODE, a Luxembourg shell corporation, and 
Icelandic banks together used inflated stock prices to raise $69 
million, mostly from hundreds of Icelanders fed promises of national 
greatness and profit. And it continues through deCODE's lucrative 2001 
initial public offering (IPO) on NASDAQ, fueled by the speculations of 
on-line investors in a volatile economy, through years of steadily 
increasing scientific success and steadily decreasing fiscal solvency, 
until its bankruptcy in 2009.

Along the way I discuss how changes in U.S. securities law fueled the
volatility that inflated deCODE.s scientific and economic promises to its
shareholders, how the political alliance behind deCODE became
implicated in the collapse of the entire Icelandic economy, and how 
Keiko the killer whale can help us make sense of it all.


*About Mike Fortun*

A graduate of Hampshire College ('82), Mike Fortun is an associate
professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at 
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York, USA. He was co-editor 
(with his wife, Prof. Kim Fortun) of _Cultural Anthropology_, the 
journal of the Society for Cultural Anthropology of the American 
Anthropological Association. A historian of the life sciences, his 
current research focuses on the contemporary science, culture, and 
political economy of genomics. His work in the life sciences has
covered the policy, scientific, and social history of the Human Genome
Project in the U.S., the history of biotechnology, and the growth of 
commercial genomics and bioinformatics in the speculative economies of 
the 1990s.
Fortun is the author of "Promising Genomics: Iceland and DeCODE Genetics 
in a World of Speculation" published by University of California Press, 
and co-author with ISIS president Herb Bernstein of "Muddling Through: 
Pursuing Science and Truths in the Twenty-first Century."

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