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Workshops

The backbone of the project “A Cultural History of Heredity” is constituted by a series of international workshops. The following workshops have either taken place or are planned to take place within the next year.

Past Workshops A Cultural History of Heredity I - IV

Heredity I, 17th and 18th Centuries: Heredity in seperate Domains

This workshop took place at the Institute May 25-26, 2001.
Participants agreed that there was no general concept of heredity underlying the discourse of the life sciences in the time period considered.

Heredity II, 18th to 19th Century: Heredity Becomes Central

This workshop took place at the institute January 10-12, 2003.
It mainly focused on the period demarcated by the publication of Kant's "Von den verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen" 1775 and Darwin's "The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication" 1868.

Heredity III, 19th to Early 20th Century: Heredity Theorized

This workshop took place January 13-16, 2005.
It covered the period from Galton's "Hereditary Talent and Character" (1865, published in MacMillan’s Magazine) to Wilhelm Johannsen's famous paper on inheritance in populations (1903).

Heredity IV, Late 19th to Mid 20th Century: Heredity in the Century of the Gene

This workshop was organized in collaboration with the ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society (Exeter) and took place at the University of Exeter December 11-14, 2006.
It was devoted to what has become known as the era of ‘classical genetics’, initiated by the rediscovery of Mendel’s laws in 1900.

Heredity V, Human Heredity in the Twentieth Century

Human Heredity in the Twentieth Century (A Cultural History of Heredity V)
September 2-4, 2010 at the Max-Planck-Istitute for the History of Science.


 

Past related Workshops

One Day Workshop: Heredity in the Century of the Gene

This workshop took place in Exeter in December 2005.
The project deals with the agricultural, technical, juridical, medical, and scientific practices in which the knowledge of heredity was materially entrenched and in which it gradually unfolded its effects in successive periods.

One Day Workshop: Reproduction in the Century of the Gene

A second one-day-workshop took place in Berlin on March 30th, 2006.
We suggested to continue our discussion with the following two main issues: 1. Reproduction in the century of the gene. 2. Sex/gender (and maybe race) in the century of the gene.

The times of cloning. Historical and cultural aspects of a biotechnological research field.

Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, March 1-4, 2007.
The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin was inviting scholars from various fields to discuss historical, cultural, social and philosophical issues of cloning and stem cell research.

History of Plant-Breeding since 1880

Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, March 28-29, 2008.
The purpose of this workshop was to bring together historians of plant-breeding in order to identify common interests and facilitate co-operation. We therefore asked participants to present their on-going research projects rather than results.

Writing Genomics: Historiographical Challenges for New Historical Developments

The rise of genomics and the many transformations it has stimulated, not only in biomedicine, but also in the organization of research and production of data, is certainly one of the most significant events of late twentieth century biology. History, however, seems to be lagging behind...

Making Mutations: objects, practices, contexts

Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, 13-15 January 2009.
This workshop aims to investigate mutation as a relatively unexplored phenomenon of interest in the history of biology.

The tenacity of the nature/nurture divide

For the last 140 years, the formula nature/nurture (Na-Nu) has captured a very basic split in the causal structure we assign to the constitution of the human. The divide determines explanatory strategies in scientific and non-scientific arenas. We capture what human beings (as individuals and as groups) are like by seeing ...

Darwin Celebration in Mexico: Darwin in Latin America, and Darwin: the Art of Doing Science

The National University of Mexico (UNAM), the Max Plank Institute for the History of Science, Berlin (MPIWG), and El Colegio Nacional (México) was hosting an international conference celebrating Charles Darwin´s bicentenary of birth and 150 years of the publication of the Origins of Species. The program included ...