Secret History: Return of the Black Death Channel 4, 7-8pm In 1348 the Black Death swept through London, killing people within days of the appearance of their first symptoms. Exactly how many died, and why, has long been a mystery. This Secret History documentary follows experts as they pick through the evidence and reveal why the plague killed on such a scale. And they ask, what might be coming next?

Medscape

Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace

The politics of life itself Biomedicine, power, and subjectivity in the twenty-first century

This book opens a fresh chapter in the debate on local enterprise clusters and their strategies for upgrading in the global economy. The authors employ a novel conceptual framework in their research on industrial clusters in Europe, Latin America and Asia and provide new perspectives and insights for researchers and policymakers alike.

Governance in global value chains

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Citizen Science: A Study of People, Expertise and Sustainable Development

In the last decade, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis and screening (PGD; PGS) have become widely used in IVF treatments: in 2005 nearly 6000 PGD/PGS (5 per cent of all IVF cycles) had been performed in Europe. The diffusion of these technologies, however, is not homogenous; whilst in some countries PGD is prohibited and in others is hardly implemented, Spain performs 33 per cent of all the PGD/PGS (ESHRE 2007). While policy guidelines and mainstream bioethics addresses PGD from a patient choice perspective (ten Have 2001, Zeiler 2004, ESHRE 2005), disability studies insist on PGD’s potentiality for discrimination (King 1999, Kerr and Shakespeare 2002). Alternatively, other authors have explored PGD from the perspective of geneticization (ten Have 2001; Hedgecoe 1998, 2001; Stempsey 2006). Other works have rather studied how PGD is framed in hospital settings (Ehrich, Williams et al. 2006, Ehrich and Williams 2010). Little work has been done, however, to study how the nature and diffusion of PGD is framed by the regulators. Combining the analysis of juridical documents with semi-structured interviews to past and present members of the Spanish National Assisted Reproduction Committee (CNRHA), this study suggests that the remarkable diffusion of PGD/PGS in Spain may be largely due to the interaction between the growing momentum enjoyed by embryonic stem cell research and a vibrant expansion of IVF business along the Mediterranean coast. In this process, genetic issues per se seem to play a minor role, although the prevention of genetic diseases constitutes the formal rationale for the extension of PGD from monogenic, early onset diseases to polygenic, late-onset ones.

Pre-Implantation Genetic Testing in Spain: beyond the geneticization thesis

Sogni e incubi dell'eugenetica liberale

D los ultimos veinte anos los paises mas desarrollados han gozado de una situacion economica fundamentalmente estable, con momentos importantes de crecimiento y de bonanza, que han propiciado una elevada inversion de recursos publicos en transporte, infraestructuras y telecomunicaciones. Durante estos anos, en la Union Europea y en Estados Unidos se fue difundiendo y aceptando la creencia de que, para seguir competiendo con los paises emergentes, como China e India, era necesario desarrollar lo que se denomino inicialmente como “economia del conocimiento” y, mas tarde, de forma especifica, como “bioeconomia basada en el conocimiento” (EU, 2007). Esta vision, desarrollada por primera vez en la Estrategia de Lisboa (EC, 2000), sugiere que para mantener la superioridad economica y una alta tasa de crecimiento y competitividad los paises necesitan invertir una elevada cantidad de recursos publicos y privados en ciencia y tecnologia. Asi, durante estos anos, los gastos en I+D+I se han mantenido muy altos, y tanto los gobiernos nacionales como la Union Europea se han comprometido a apoyar y fortalecer la investigacion basica y aplicada, sobre todo en los sectores mas novedosos, como las biotecnologias agricolas y medicas, la nanotecnologia y las tecnologias de las telecomunicaciones.

Invertir en ciencia y tecnología en tiempos de austeridad económica: ¿que opinan los ciudadanos?

Public assessment of new security technologies: beyond the trade-off between privacy and security

How would an academic association look that doesn’t have the characteristics of a “typical association”? Which members would form the association? Which places would be its sites of action? These are a few questions that, at least partially, describe the developing process of the Spanish Network for Science and Technology Studies (Red eSCTS) since its launch in 2010. The very name of a “network” (instead of association) points to a first main goal: to explore a new modality of academic relation. Indeed, the main goal of the network is to promote a stable and fluid network of collaboration and dialogue between STS researchers in Spain and abroad. This is accompanied by a more ambitious idea of providing a space that will allow the collective imagining of new ways of collaborating and researching in an academic and research environment in turmoil. A second aim has to do with the openness and composition of the network. Some of us wonder whether the network could be composed not only of academics, but be open to other social actors. Some of us have started to play with the idea, thinking how we could broaden the academic dialogue to include new social actors. In that sense, we like to consider this process as an experiment of prototyping a modality of academic formal association. But, before setting this argument we want to offer some reflections on the process of development of the Spanish Network for Science and Technology Studies (Red eSCTS). For that, in the next sections, we will explicitly refer to the “connections”, “places” and “people” that shape the network. Connections. The network grew out from the very fragmented situation of STS studies in Spain, located either within departments of Philosophy or Social Psychology or pursued by single individuals. To the best of our knowledge, there are only two masters programmes that explicitly provide a specific training in the field, namely the Master in Science, Technology and Society (organized by the University of Salamanca and the University of Oviedo) and the Postgraduate course in STS (organized by the STS department at the Philosophy Institute at CSIC), and they stand as the exceptions to the norm. Within this context in 2011, a year after the launch of the network, there was a shared feeling among many participants that the Spanish STS network (Red eSCTS) stood at a crucial point. It was a crucial moment for several reasons, some related to the internal development of the network and others related to the overall situation of academic research and science policy in Spain. The context for the network inception was also crucial because of the dramatic changes in the scientific and academic environment in Spain, which have been recently characterized by massive cuts on public funds to public research, by the drastic reduction (or altogether elimination) of doctoral and postdoctoral grants, the interruption of turnover in public jobs and salary cuts to public employees. The network expanded rapidly to include more than 140 members (last checked in February 2013) and has spread across different institutions, fields and research groups in Spain and abroad. At the same time, the network has consolidated its day-to-day activities thanks to digital technologies (an active Google-groups space, a Facebook page and a not so buzzy blog). We had an intense debate during the second meeting of the network about the kind of digital infrastructure that the network should use. Some participants strongly argued for abandoning the afore-mentioned technologies and advocated in favor of using free

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Vincenzo Pavone

Papers

Pre-Implantation Genetic Testing in Spain: beyond the geneticization thesis

Sogni e incubi dell'eugenetica liberale

Invertir en ciencia y tecnología en tiempos de austeridad económica: ¿que opinan los ciudadanos?

Public assessment of new security technologies: beyond the trade-off between privacy and security

Prototyping an Academic Network: people, places and connections. Three years of the Spanish Network fo Science and Technology Studies