[bioundgrd] FW: IAP Biology Offerings -- Monday, January 9, 2023

[Joshua Stone]

From: Biograds
Date: Friday, January 6, 2023 at 3:39 PM
Subject: IAP Biology Offerings -- Monday, January 9, 2023
Skills to Find Your Path
Delivering an Engaging Scientific Presentation
Britt Glaunsinger, PhD
Associate Chair of the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology and Professor of Plant and Microbial Biology and Molecular and Cell Biology, UC Berkeley
Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Back by popular demand! Come hear from Professor Britt Glaunsinger on how to design and deliver an effective and engaging scientific presentation. This seminar will be interactive, so attendees are encouraged to bring laptops to engage fully with the material.
Monday, January 9th, 1-3 p.m., KI Luria Auditorium, 76-156




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Science and Society Seminar Series
1st talk in the Series

“Constitutions selection”: Darwin, race and medicine
Dr. Suman Seth
Marie Underhill Noll Professor, History of Science, Cornell University


In the course of his discussion of the origin of variations in skin colour among humans in the Descent
of Man, Charles Darwin suggested that darker skin might be correlated with immunity to certain
diseases. To make that suggestion, he drew upon a claim that seemed self-evidently correct in
1871, although it had seemed almost certainly incorrect in the late eighteenth century: that immunity
to disease could be understood as a hereditary racial trait. This paper aims to show how fundamental
was the idea of ‘constitutions selection’, as Darwin would call it, for his thinking about
human races, tracking his (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to find proof of its operation over a
period of more than thirty years. At the same time and more broadly, following Darwin’s conceptual
resources on this question helps explicate relationships between conceptions of disease and conceptions of race in the nineteenth century. That period saw the birth of a modern, fixist, biologically
determinist racism, which increasingly manifested itself in medical writings. The reverse was also
true: medicine was a crucial site in which race was forged. The history of what has been called
‘race-science’, it is argued, cannot and should not be written independent of the history of ‘racemedicine’.
Monday, January 9th 3-4:30 pm
Hybrid 68-181 | https://mit.zoom.us/j/93339545255








More detail on these at Biology IAP website: https://biology.mit.edu/about/iap
For these and other IAP Events: https://calendar.mit.edu/MIT_IAP




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