Institute for Provocation cordially invites you to attend Science and Philosophy in Dialogue: CRISPR & Biodigital Desire, a conversation between Cong Le and You Mi, this Friday at 4:30 PM.
Time and Location
2017.12.29 4:30 PM Institute for Provocation · IFP Studio
Cong Le, core team member that developed the ground-breaking genetic editing CRISPR/Cas systems, will be joined by media/art theorist and curator You Mi to discuss latest technologies in genome engineering and philosophy of biodigital desire. Existing originally in nature as part of the bacterial immune system, CRISPR/Cas has been successfully induced to cut human genome at precise locations by the team of Zhang Feng and Cong Le at Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Apart from elucidating the technological aspects, the dialogue will turn around ethical implications of transgenetic technologies. Further, in an interlocution with speculative philosophy, the dialogue probes into the philosophy of (and beyond) science in questions of endosymbiosis (Margulis and Sagan) and “biophysical – biocultural – biodigital” (Parisi) desire.
Extended Reading:
Cong Le et al. “Multiplex genome engineering using CRISPR/Cas systems” Science. Online January 3, 2013. DOI: 10.1126/science.1231143
You Mi. “Desire, DNA and Transgenetic Technology: Life after Necropolitics” in Natasha Lushetich (ed.) The Aesthetics of Necropolitics, Rowman and Littlefield, 2018.
About the Speakers:
Cong Le,
Assistant Professor, Stanford University (tentative starting 2018)
Postdoctoral Associate, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
Visiting Investigator, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden
Dr. Cong obtained his Bachelor of Science with highest honor from Tsinghua University, and his Ph.D. from Harvard Medical School. He completed doctoral work primarily in Dr. Feng Zhang’s laboratory, where he published a seminal study in Science that demonstrated the application of CRISPR/Cas9 for genome editing. This article remains one of the most highly cited papers in CRISPR field. He has obtained over 14 issued U.S. and European Union patents, and subsequently modified the CRISPR system for gene and cell therapy. He is currently working to apply single-cell genomics and genome engineering for cancer immunotherapy under Dr. Aviv Regev at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and will soon be starting his own independent group. Dr. Cong was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) International Fellow, a Cancer Research Institute (CRI) Irvington Fellow, and was included in the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia/China list of young innovators and entrepreneurs.
You Mi is a Beijing-born curator, researcher, and academic staff at Academy of Media Arts Cologne. She has worked as curator of artistic research projects that were shown in Shenzhen/Hong Kong Bi-City Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism (2007), Istanbul Design Biennale (2012), Lisbon Triennale and Athens Biennale (2013), v2_lab for the unstable media (2015), SAVVY Contemporary (2016), among others. Her long-term research and curatorial project takes the Silk Road as a figuration for deep-time, deep-space, de-centralized and nomadic imageries. Under this rubric she has curated a series of performative programs at Asian Culture Center Theater in Gwangju, South Korea and the inaugural Ulaanbaatar International Media Art Festival, Mongolia (2016).
She has lectured internationally, including at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Vera List Center for Arts and Politics (New York), Rijksakademie (Amsterdam), Global Art Forum (Dubai), and has taught at Dutch Art Institute, Berlin University of the Arts, among others. Her academic interests are in performance philosophy, science and technology studies, and philosophy of immanence in Eastern and Western traditions. Her writings appear in Performance Research, PARSE, MaHKUscript: Journal of Fine Art Research, Yishu, LEAP, among others.
She is fellow of Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany), Zentrum Paul Klee (Switzerland) and Independent Curators International (USA) and serves as director of Arthub (Shanghai and international) advisor to The Institute for Provocation (Beijing).