personality

Why write about the life and work of contemporary biomedical and life scientists? What is the use of the genre of biography for understanding contemporary biomedicine? Is it just history by other means, or does biography writing have other uses as well? In an article titled “The Seven Sisters: Subgenres of Bioi of Contemporary Life […]

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about neurophysiologist and Nobel Prize winner Ragnar Granit’s essay on the distinction between discovery and understanding as two separate modes of scientific work, which, he suggested, are differentially distributed throughout a scientist’s life-course — young researchers are impatient to discover something new, whereas older scientists are more interested in getting insight, he suggested. Even more interesting, in […]

Prompted by a recent guest blog post on the Scientific American site, I’ve just revisited an almost 40 year old essay titled “Discovery and understanding” by the Finland-Swedish neurophysiologist and Nobel Prize Winner Ragnar Granit. Growing out of a talk (see video here) that Granit gave at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in 1972, the essay was published in the Annual Review of Physiology later the same year. I remember dimly having read […]

How is one’s personal identity constructed these day? I’m asking, because I just read the announcement for a series of workshops and a special issue of the journal Minds and Machines on ‘The Construction of Personal Identities Online’. Makes me think about how, over the last five or ten years, I have probably spent more […]

Studies of biomedicine (a subarea of science studies) has long been defined in terms of social studies of biomedicine (social studies of science). Over the years, some, but alas not many, scholars (including myself) have tried to infuse some awareness of the individual and personal dimensions of biomedicine. Now, an interdisciplinary conference titled ‘Turning Personal’ at the University […]