Julianna Yau’s blog

I won’t be able to make it to this one, but it sounds like fun (to me, anyway!):

The Innovation Law & Theory Workshop

Presents

David Winickoff

Assistant Professor, Bioethics and Society, University of California, Berkeley

Topic: Justice and the Management of Genomic Biobanks: A Procedural Rejoinder to Benefit-Sharing

Date: Friday, September 26, 2008

Time: 12:30 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.

Place: Solarium, Falconer Hall, 84 Queen’s Park

Description: Assemblages of personal health information, human DNA, and other heterogeneous forms of capital known as “biobanks” remain controversial events in the ethics and politics of the life sciences. Recent disputes around property in medical records, genetic data, and tissue samples demonstrate that the now-famous Moore v. Regents case was but the tip of a large iceberg of normative unsettlement in this area. Even as new and larger biobanking initiatives are emerging across the globe, scholarship on biobank governance has comparatively ignored property in favor of focusing on consent, IRBs, and privacy. What is “genomic capital,” and how should it be structured in order to advance various goals? In this vein, governance in UK Biobank deserves attention and scrutiny, as it is staking out a new imagination of the genomic biobank as a common-pool resource. The talk will explore the ways in which, if pushed further, the ideal of “partnership” articulated in the UK might be translated into legal rights of joint control across funders, research participants, and research institutes. Such an approach seeks to advance notions of justice neither by soft norms of benefit sharing nor by rigid earmarks. Rather, such an approach seeks to create structural conditions for the negotiation of the potentially conflicting charitable goals of major participants—i.e., a procedural approach to just benefit distribution.

Bio: David Winickoff is Assistant Professor of Bioethics and Society at U.C Berkeley. Professor Winickoff develops policies for governments, foundations, universities and the private sector that help guide innovation to address the most pressing environmental and health problems. His bioethics scholarship spans topics of biotechnology, systems of property and intellectual property, race, environmental regulation, food safety, human subjects research, and public health. He has published 23 articles in leading bioethics, biomedical, law and science studies journals. In 2007, Winickoff was chosen to be a Greenwall Faculty Scholar in Bioethics, a national award to foster the careers to the most promising young faculty in bioethics. Winickoff is also Co-director of the Science, Technology and Society Center, and the founder and executive director of the Science, Technology, Ethics and Law Working Group at UC Berkeley. Winickoff has also taught at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Public Policy, and he holds degrees from Yale University, Cambridge University, UK, and Harvard Law School.

Lunch will be provided – No RSVPs are required
For further information please contact Andrea Slane at centre.ilp@utoronto.ca

On September 15, Facebook was dotted with profiles, sans profile pictures. This was done in protest of the recent arts funding cuts which were discovered, without warning, consultation or announcement, to show how the loss of arts & culture would mean a loss of cultural identity for Canadians.

I participated in this protest, and will join those who are remaining faceless until the election, such as Chris Foley. Being faceless for a day was very difficult for me, because I use the profile to showcase my recent sculptures, and my sculptures are part of who I am. Instead of seeing one of my creations, having to look at the ghostly silhouette of a nameless person was more than unsettling.

What was most telling of how intimitately connected our identity is with art & culture is the variety of Facless For the Arts profile pictures created by users so they can show they are faceless specificially in support of art & culture.

So as part of my work to raise awareness about the impacts and implications of the arts funding cuts, I will be faceless not merely in Facebook, but in all my online social networks.