Program on Science, Technology and Society at Harvard

Biographies

Program Participants at the Architectures For Life Workshop

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Jon Beckwith is the American Cancer Society Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at Harvard Medical School. He has made landmark discoveries in the field of molecular biology, including the first isolation of a gene. Following this discovery, he has made important contributions to the study of bacterial genetics. His studies include the mechanisms of protein secretion, disulfide bond formation, and cell division. In addition, he is a prominent speaker on the social implications of science and has been an activist in science. He has received numerous awards, including the Abbott-ASM Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Microbiology, and election to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences. He has worked on issues of social responsibility in science and since 1983 has taught a course on the Social Issues in Biology at Harvard University, one of the first of its kind. He is an editor of The Double-Edged Helix (Johns Hopkins University Press) and the author of Making Genes, Making Waves (Harvard University Press).

Ruha Benjamin is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Boston University. Benjamin’s teaching and research interests are in the areas of science, medicine and biotechnology; the construction and naturalization of racial and gender taxonomies; science policy, public health and social theory. She is currently completing a book, People’s Science: Reconstituting Bodies & Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (Stanford University Press), which examines ethnoracial, gender, class, and disability politics as a constitutive feature of stem cell research. In a second project, Provincializing Science: Mapping & Marketing Ethnoracial Diversity in the Genomic Age (in preparation), she is investigating how newly derived genetic classifications are impacting social groupings in three countries (India, Mexico, and South Africa), with attention to how commercial forces are driving the creation of ethnic drug markets as a proxy for public health. Prior to joining the faculty at BU from, Benjamin completed a two year fellowship in the Center for Society and Genetics at UCLA. She has received grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and UC Berkeley Townsend Center for the Humanities.

George Church is Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is Director of the U.S. Department of Energy Center on Bioenergy at Harvard and MIT and Director of the National Institutes of Health Center of Excellence in Genomic Science at Harvard. His 1984 Harvard PhD included the first direct genomic sequencing, molecular multiplexing and barcode tags. These lead to automation and software used for the first commercial genome sequence (of the pathogen Helicobacter) in 1994. His multiplex solid-phase sequencing evolved into polonies (1999), ABI-SOLiD (2005), open-source   Polonator.org (2007), and Complete Genomics (2008). Innovations in DNA reading, writing and cell/tissue engineering lead to consumer-directed genomics (23andme, Knome), synthetic biology (SynBERC, Joule, LS9) & new ethics, safety and security strategies. He founded PersonalGenomes.org, which provides the world’s only open-access information source for human genomic, environmental and trait data (GET). He is a member of NAS and NAE, Hoogendijk Prize awardee and Franklin Laureate for Achievement in Science.

Glenn Cohen is an Assistant Professor at Harvard Law School and Co-Director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. Prof. Cohen is one of the world’s leading experts on the intersection of bioethics (sometimes also called “medical ethics”) and the law, as well as health law. He also teaches civil procedure. From Seoul to Krakow to Vancouver, Professor Cohen has spoken at legal, medical, and industry conferences around the world and his work has been covered on PBS, NPR, in the Boston Globe, and several other media venues. Prof. Cohen’s current projects relate to reproduction/reproductive technology and to medical tourism – the travel of patients who are residents of one country, the “home country,” to another country, the “destination country,” for medical treatment. His past work has included projects on end of life decision-making, FDA regulation, research ethics, and commodification. His award-winning academic work has appeared in numerous academic journals.

Arthur Daemmrich is an assistant professor in the Business, Government and the International Economy Unit and a faculty member of the HBS Healthcare Initiative. He is especially interested in health and environmental risks, and the conditions under which they are destabilizing to firms and regulatory agencies. His research includes analyses of regulation, innovation policy, and international business, with a particular focus on the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and chemical industries. Daemmrich has published in interdisciplinary scholarly journals and the trade press. His first book, Pharmacopolitics (2004), compares drug regulation in the United States and Germany by analyzing regulatory laws, clinical trial methods, and post-market monitoring in the two countries. Daemmrich is currently writing a book comparing the regulation of the chemical industry in the United States and Europe. Presently, Daemmrich is initiating research into emerging information businesses, beginning with electronic patient records in healthcare. The project will expand to encompass several other industries, including intellectual property services, and internet-based communications providers. Overall, the intent is to analyze across industries that create information as a good or service, process information on behalf of clients, and disseminate information goods. Before joining the HBS faculty in 2007, Daemmrich was the founding director of the Center for Contemporary History and Policy at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia.

Stephen Friend is the President of Sage Bionetworks. He was previously Senior Vice President and Franchise Head for Oncology Research at Merck & Co., Inc. where he led Merck’s Basic Cancer Research efforts. In 2005, he led the Advanced Technologies and Oncology groups to firmly establish molecular profiling activities throughout Merck’s laboratories around the world, as well as to coordinate oncology programs from Basic Research through phase IIA clinical trials. Prior to joining Merck, Dr. Friend was recruited by Dr. Leland Hartwell to join the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center’s Seattle Project, an advanced institute for drug discovery. While there Drs. Friend and Hartwell developed a method for examining large patterns of genes that led them to co-found Rosetta Inpharmatics in 2001. Dr. Friend has also held faculty positions at Harvard Medical School from 1987 to 1995 and at Massachusetts General Hospital from 1990 to 1995. He received his B.A. in philosophy, his Ph.D. in biochemistry and his M.D. from Indiana University.

Archon Fung is Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Citizenship. His research examines the impacts of civic participation, public deliberation, and transparency upon public and private governance. His Empowered Participation: Reinventing Urban Democracy examines two participatory-democratic reform efforts in low-income Chicago neighborhoods. Current projects also examine initiatives in ecosystem management, toxics reduction, endangered species protection, local governance, and international labor standards. His recent books and edited collections include Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance; Can We Eliminate Sweatshops?; Working Capital: The Power of Labors Pensions; and Beyond Backyard Environmentalism. His articles on regulation, rights, and participation appear in Political Theory; Journal of Political Philosophy; Politics and Society; Governance; Environmental Management; American Behavioral Scientist; and Boston Review. Fung received two SBs and a PhD from MIT.

Jeremy Greene is Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Science of Harvard University, Instructor in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics of Harvard Medical School, and Associate Physician in the Department of Medicine of Brigham & Women’s Hospital. His research interests focus on the history of the pharmaceutical industry and its interactions with medical research, clinical practice, and public health, and his first book, Prescribing By Numbers: Drugs and the Definition of Disease (2007, Johns Hopkins University Press) traces the development of chronic disease categories as markets for risk-reducing pharmaceuticals. Currently he is working on a history of essential medications in global health, with other projects focused on medication nonadherence, access to generic pharmaceuticals, and the historical development and impact of pharmaceutical marketing, advertising, and salesmanship. He is the faculty coordinator for the Harvard Interfaculty Initiative on Medications and Society, a network of Harvard faculty collaborating to bring a broad range of scholarly approaches to bear on understanding how prescription drugs are developed, marketed, regulated, evaluated, perceived and consumed by patients, utilized in clinical practice, and paid for. Jeremy received his MD and his PhD in the history of science from Harvard in 2005, and he completed his residency in Internal Medicine at the Brigham & Women’s Hospital in 2008, he is board certified in Internal Medicine and a member of the American College of Physicians.

Benjamin Heywood has served as the president and director of PatientsLikeMe since its inception in 2004.  His professional experience spans a diverse set of operational areas including successful ventures in the medical device industry, the entertainment industry, and in speculative residential real estate development.  After graduating from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Heywood moved to Silicon Valley to work for Target Therapeutics, the leading designer and manufacturer of microcatheter-based products for the treatment of stroke. After significant involvement in both manufacturing and product design, he eventually moved into Business Development until Boston Scientific acquired the company. Prior to co-founding PatientsLikeMe, Heywood was a Creative Executive at the film and television production company SideStreet Entertainment. A highly regarded thought leader in the Health 2.0 industry, Heywood is a frequent speaker at conferences and source for the news media on topics in this space.  He has been quoted in New York Times Magazine, CNNMoney and numerous trade publications.  Heywood earned his Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from MIT and received his MBA from the UCLA Anderson Graduate School of Management.

Ben Hurlbut is trained as an historian of the modern biomedical and life sciences. His research lies at the intersection of bioethics, political theory and science and technology studies. He studies the historical development of approaches to governance of emerging technologies in the United States, focusing in particular on discourse, politics, and institutions of deliberation for contending with morally and technically complex problems. In particular, he has studied the history of the scientific, political and ethical debates around human embryo research in the United States. He examines the various the settings in which ethical concerns over human embryo research were deliberated, from public ethics bodies to state level referenda, tracing how notions of democracy, religious and moral pluralism, and public reason were constructed in each setting. One purpose of his research is to bring historical and qualitative social science approaches to bear on normative problems in bioethics and political theory. Dr. Hurlbut received an A.B. in Classics from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in the History of Science from Harvard University. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Program on Science, Technology and Society at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Sheila Jasanoff is Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School. A pioneer in her field, she has authored more than 100 articles and chapters and is author or editor of a dozen books, including Controlling Chemicals, The Fifth Branch, Science at the Bar, and Designs on Nature. Her work explores the role of science and technology in the law, politics, and policy of modern democracies, with particular attention to the nature of public reason. She was founding chair of the STS Department at Cornell University and has held numerous distinguished visiting appointments in the US, Europe, and Japan. Jasanoff served on the Board of Directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and as President of the Society for Social Studies of Science. Her grants and awards include a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship and an Ehrenkreuz from the Government of Austria. She holds AB, JD, and PhD degrees from Harvard, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Twente.

Raju Kucherlapati is the Paul C. Cabot Professor in the Harvard Medical School Department of Genetics. He is also a professor in the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Kucherlapati was the first Scientific Director of the Harvard Medical School-Partners Healthcare Center for Genetics and Genomics. His research focuses on gene mapping, gene modification, and cloning disease genes. From 1989-2001, Dr. Kucherlapati was the Lola and Saul Kramer Professor of Molecular Genetics and Chairman of the Department at the Yeshiva University Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He was previously a professor in the Department of Genetics at the University of Illinois, College of Medicine. He began his research as an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemical Sciences at Princeton University. He has chaired numerous NIH committees and served on the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research and the NCI Mouse Models for Human Cancer Consortium. He is also a member of the Cancer Genome Atlas project of the National Institutes of Health. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Sanford Kwinter is Professor of Architectural Theory and Criticism at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is a writer and editor who holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Columbia University. He has taught at MIT, Columbia and Rice universities as well as at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt, the Architectural Association in London, and the Universitat fur Angewandte Kunst in Vienna. He was cofounder and editor of the journal ZONE and Zone Books for 20 years. He has written widely on philosophical issues of design, architecture and urbanism, science and technology and was an editorial member of the ANY conferences and publications in the 1990s as well as of the journal Assemblage. He is the author of over a hundred and fifty articles in a dozen languages. His books include Architectures of Time: Towards a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture (MIT Press, 2001), Far From Equilibrium: Essays on Technology and Design Culture (Actar, 2008) and Requiem: For the City at the End of the Millennium and the forthcoming Soft Systems on the life sciences and and their impact on design. He writes frequently on the work of young and emerging practitioners in the nascent and transdisciplinary field of experimental spatial practice. He most recently curated a Harvard University-wide exhibition of art, design and the public domain entitled “The Divine Comedy.” He is currently at work on a book on paleo-ecology and the origins of form.

Lawrence Lessig is the Director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University, and a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Prior to returning to Harvard, Lessig was a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School (where he founded Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society), Harvard Law School, and the University of Chicago Law School. Lessig serves on the boards of Creative Commons, MAPLight, Brave New Film Foundation, Change Congress, The American Academy, Berlin, Freedom House and iCommons.org. For much of his academic career, Lessig has focused on law and technology, especially as it affects copyright. He is the author of five books on the subject — Remix (2008),Code v2 (2007), Free Culture (2004), The Future of Ideas (2001) and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999) — and has served as lead counsel in a number of important cases marking the boundaries of copyright law in a digital age, including Eldred v. Ashcroft, a challenge to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, and Golan v. Holder. His current academic work addresses the question of “institutional corruption” — roughly, influences within an economy of influence that weaken the effectiveness of an institution, or weaken public trust. His current work at the EJ Safra Lab oversees a 5 year research project addressing institutional corruption in a number of institutional contexts.

Craig Lipset is Director of Health Technologies at Pfizer, working from the company’s New York corporate headquarters.At Pfizer, Craig is responsible for technology-based initiatives spanning clinical and commercial.  Serving as Platform Leader for patient adherence technologies, Craig is working at a transactional as well as strategic level in the appropriate application of technologies to monitor and influence adherence. Prior to Pfizer, Craig served as Associate Vice President of Program Management at Adnexus Therapeutics (acquired by Bristol-Myers Squibb), where he was responsible for Toxicology, Clinical, and Regulatory.  He served as President of Critical Path Imaging, a consulting firm improving the use of medical imaging in drug development.  Craig was a founding employee of Perceptive Informatics, a clinical technology services and software company (later operating as a subsidiary of Parexel International), where he was Head of Operations and Business Development for the company”s core lab business. He serves on the editorial board of the Drug Information Journal, and as an advisor to a patient research and advocacy organization.

Charles E. Rosenberg is Professor of the History of Science and Ernest E. Monrad Professor in the Social Sciences at Harvard University.  He has written widely on the history of medicine and science and is best known for his Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago, 1962, new edition, 1987), The Trial of the Assassin Guiteau. Psychiatry and Law in the Gilded Age (Chicago, 1968). He has also co-authored or edited another half-dozen books and is currently at work on a history of conceptions of disease during the past two centuries. Rosenberg is a recipient of the William H. Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM) and the George Sarton Medal (for lifetime achievement) from the History of Science Society; he has served as president of the AAHM and Society for the Social History of Medicine (UK) and on the executive board of the Organization of American Historians and on the council of the History of Science Society and of the AAHM.  He has been awarded fellowships by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation (twice), and the Rockefeller Foundation. He is a member (and council member) of the American Philosophical Society, Institute of Medicine, and fellow of the American Antiquarian Society and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. His editorial responsibilities have included a term as editor of Isis, the History of Science Society journal, and editor of series at Cambridge University Press (on the social history of medicine) and the Johns Hopkins University Press (on the history of disease).

Krishanu Saha is a fellow in the Program on Science, Technology and Society at Harvard, a Society in Science: Branco-Weiss Fellow, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT. Kris seeks to expand his background in working with nascent human engineered materials to investigate the modeling of diseases at the cellular level with human “reprogrammed” stem cell lines. By drawing on analytical tools in both science and STS, this project will examine the assumptions built into “diseases in a dish.” As these diseases in a dish are constructed through stem cell biology and engineering, laboratory work will be extended to examine the moral, economic, and political status of these objects. Kris studied Chemical Engineering at Cornell University and University of California, Berkeley. In his dissertation he worked on experimental and computational analyses of neural stem cell development, as well as the design of new materials for adult stem cell culture. In 2007 he moved to the laboratory of Rudolf Jaenisch at the Whitehead Institute as a postdoctoral fellow. Since 2006 he has worked with human embryonic stem cells and the institutional policies surrounding them.

Tania Simoncelli currently works for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. She worked for more than six years as the Science Advisor to the American Civil Liberties Union, where she guided the organization’s responses to cutting-edge developments in biotechnology, neuroscience and public health policy. She has written and spoken extensively on emerging forensic DNA techniques and practices and their legal and social implications. Ms. Simoncelli holds a BA in Biology & Society from Cornell University and an MS in Energy and Resources from the University of California, Berkeley. She has worked as a researcher, analyst, and consultant for a range of nonprofit environmental and social justice organizations, including the Environmental Defense Fund and the Center for Genetics and Society, and is an active Board Member of the Council for Responsible Genetics.

Sharon F. Terry is President and CEO of the Genetic Alliance, a network transforming health by promoting openness as process and product, centered on the health of individuals, families and communities. She is the founding CEO of PXE International, a research advocacy organization for the genetic condition pseudoxanthoma elasticum (PXE). Following the diagnosis of their two children with pseudoxanthoma elasticum (PXE) in 1994, Sharon, a former college chaplain, and her husband, Patrick, founded and built a dynamic organization that enables ethical research and policies and provides support and information to members and the public. Along with the other co-inventors of the gene associated with PXE (ABCC6), she holds the patent for the invention. Ms. Terry is also a co-founder of the Genetic Alliance Biobank. It is a centralized biological and data repository catalyzing translational genomic research on genetic diseases. The BioBank works in partnership with academic and industrial collaborators to develop novel diagnostics and therapeutics to better understand and treat these diseases. She is at the forefront of consumer participation in genetics research, services and policy and serves as a member of many of the major governmental advisory committees on biomedical research, including the HIT Standards Committee for the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, liaison to the Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Heritable Disorders and Genetic Diseases in Newborns and Children and the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research, NHGRI, NIH. Terry is committed to personal transformation as a catalyst for the systems change needed to improve health and wellness.

Patricia J. Williams is a James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia University School of Law.  A graduate of Wellesley College and Harvard Law School, she has served on faculties at the University of Wisconsin School of Law, Harvard University’s Women’s Studies Program, and the City University of New York Law School at Queen’s College. As a law professor, she has testified before congress, acted as a consultant and coordinator for a variety of public interest lawsuits, and served as a past member of the boards of the Center for Constitutional Rights, of the Society of American Law Teachers, and of the Nation Organization for Women’s Legal Defense and Education Fund.  She has authored numerous articles for scholarly journals and popular magazines and newspapers including USA Today, Harvard Law Review, Tikkun, theNew York Times Book Review, The Nation, Ms. Magazine, and the Village Voice. She has written on the rhetoric of the war on terror, race, ethnicity, gender, all aspects of civil rights law, bioethics and eugenics, forensic uses of DNA, and comparative issues of class and culture in the US, France, and Britain.