The Joint Atlantic Seminar series offers the opportunity for graduate students in the history of the life sciences to present their work to a well-informed audience in an informal and encouraging setting. JAS-Bio has fostered a long tradition of collegiality amongst historians of biology along the eastern seaboard including the north-eastern United States and south-eastern Canada. It is one of the nicest ways to present an early career paper and meet other participants in the field.
Group Conveners
Nathaniel Comfort
I am interested in heredity and health in twentieth century America. My recent book project examined the growth and evolution of medical genetics from the early days of Mendelism to the Human Genome Project. In it, I show that heredity, health, and human improvement have always been intermingled; there was no break when medical genetics became “legitimate.” The professionalization of medical genetics that began around mid-century involved many refinements of the message, but the old goals of human improvement dating back to Francis Galton carry down to present-day efforts such as gene therapy. Likewise, trendy contemporary notions of individualism and personalized medicine have roots back in the late nineteenth century, with Archibald Garrod’s emphasis on diathesis and biochemical individuality. I strenuously avoid labeling one of these good and the other bad; these twin impulses resonate with and feed off of one another, and both have inspiring and sobering implications for how we think about health and identity today.
Lijing Jiang
I am a historian of modern life sciences, often finding myself probing the question how epistemic and cultural interpretations and material manipulations of organisms or objects shaped varied processes of knowledge production in biology and biotechnology. I started my major inquiries with a PhD dissertation on the history of cell death and aging research and am currently working on a monograph about how ornamental fish functioned as model organisms in twentieth-century East Asia and North America.