EP #215 - 02.04.2021 - Biomedicine in the Archive with Joanna Radin & Robin Wolfe Scheffler

Today is the second of three COVIDCalls special episodes in partnership with two great research libraries: the American Philosophical Society and the Linda Hall Library.  These episodes will explore challenges and new approaches for research libraries and the patrons that use them in the time of COVID.  Today I welcome Joanna Radin and Robin Wolfe Scheffler to the discussion.

Joanna Radin is a historian of life and human sciences at Yale University, where she is Associate Professor of History of Medicine and a core member of the Program in History of Science & Medicine. There, she is also affiliated with the Departments of History, Anthropology, and American Studies as well as the Programs in Ethnicity, Race & Migration and Religion & Modernity. She is the author of the book Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood (Chicago 2017) and co-editor (with Emma Kowal) of Cryopolitics: Freezing Life in a Melting World (MIT 2017). In addition to numerous academic journals, her writing has also appeared in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books and The New Inquiry. She is currently at work on a book, tentatively titled, Surreal Science: Michael Crichton, Mass Media and the Manipulation of Modern Life. Radin is co-editor (with Adrian Johns) of the Science as Culture series at University of Chicago Press.

Robin Wolfe Scheffler is an Associate Professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. His first book, A Contagious Cause:The American Hunt for Cancer Viruses and the Rise of Molecular Medicine (University of Chicago Press, 2019) examined the century-long effort to identify a human cancer virus and develop a vaccine. His current research, supported by the National Science Foundation focuses on the history of the biotechnology industry in the Greater Boston Area.