WONBIT Conference | Women in biotechnology: feminist and scientific approaches.

Laura Balbo
Professor of sociology (Department of Humanities at Ferrara University). She was dean of the Faculty. She also taught at Milan University, Department of Political Science, at Milan Polytechnic and at UCSC (University of California).
She took leave having been elected at the Italian Parliament from 1983 to 1992. She occupied the post of Minister for Equal Opportunities from October 1999 to April 2000.
She worked as a consultant for the European Office of the World Health Organization in Copenhagen, and for Unesco; she has taken part in work groups and commissions of the European Union (DG V and DG XII).
She has published extensively. She is a member of the editorial committee of Italian and European magazines for which she regularly writes.

Amalia Bosia
Since 1980: full professor of Biochemistry at the Facoulty of Medicine of the University of Turin. Coordinator and teacher of the PhD program "Biochemistry and cellular biotechnology". Scientific coordinator of several projects financed by the Ministry of Research, the National Council of Research and the Piemonte Region. Recent research interests: regolazione della sintesi di vasocostrittori e di vasodilatatori in endotelio umano e murino normale e trasformato; ruolo regolatore di monossido di azoto ( NO ) e di composti NO-mimetici sulla sintesi endoteliale di vasocostrittori; caratterizzazione dell’enzima NO-sintasi costitutiva e inducibile in cellule vascolari; ruolo della iperespressione di NO-sintasi nella proliferazione, crescita e funzione di cellule vascolari normali e trasformate; ruolo di NO nella differenziazione di cellule trasformate; ruolo di NO nell’azione antiaggregante, vasodilatatrice, e antiapoptotica dell’insulina. Pubblications on this issues can be found on the Medline Journal (http://medline.cos.com/
http://www.dgbb-biochimica.unito.it/Bosia/indice.htm).

Elena Cattaneo
Her research activity is focused on staminal neuronal cells, their applications and the analysis of neurodegenerative mechanisms in the Huntington's Corea. Elena Cattaneo obtained the degree in Pharmacy in 1986 (Summa cum Laude) and the PhD in Biotechnologies at the University of Milan. She spent three years as a research scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T., Cambridge, U.S.A.) in the laboratory of Prof. Ron McKay, where she started working on staminal cells and brain's ancenstors. Back in Italy she continued her reserach on staminal cells and started a new research approach on Huntington's Corea. Since 2003 is full professor of Pharmacology at the University of Milan.
http://users.unimi.it/~spharm/cattaneo/pagineIT/ITelenac.html

Sylvie Coyaud
Giournalist and translator since a long time works on scientific communication with a special focus on development. Nowadays she writes for the Sole-24 Ore and la Repubblica Italian newspapers. Since 25 years has a radio broadcast on the Radio Popolare about science and society and nowadays she also runs a radio broadcast about scientific knowledge for RAI- Radio3.

Marsha Darling
Professor of History and Interdisciplinary Studies, and the Director of the Center for African American & Ethnic Studies Program at Adelphi University. She is a recognized scholar focused on the areas of race, gender, and justice with relation to genetics and biotechnology, among other areas. She has published and presented extensively on these topics. In addition, Darling has chaired an UN expert group on gender and racial discrimination, which was responsible for preparing a working paper, entitled "Distributive Justice Issues and the Construction of State Interests re: Women of Color," and a report, entitled "Gender and Racial Discrimination." She is also involved in several organizations, including the Association for Women's Rights in Development and the Global Network for Women's Reproductive Rights.
http://www.adelphi.edu/faculty/profiles/profile.php?PID=0144

Giovanna Di Chiro
Giovanna Di Chiro teaches in the Earth and Environment Department and the Gender Studies Department at Mount Holyoke College. She has published widely on the intersections of gender, race, and environmental justice. She is co-editor of the collection, Appropriating Technology: Vernacular Science and Social Power (University of Minnesota Press, 2004), which examines the benefits and pitfalls of adopting a variety of technologies to promote social and environmental justice. Currently she is completing her book, Uncommon Expertise: Women, Science, and Environmental Politics. This book explores the historical and cross-cultural emergence of the production of “uncommon expertise” (the blending of community-based environmental knowledge and university-generated scientific knowledge) through women activists' encounters with scientific institutions in grassroots environmental, health, and development struggles. She is a founder of the Pioneer Valley Community Environmental Health Coalition and works in collaboration with Nuestras Raíces — a Latino environmental justice organization — to conduct community-based participatory action research on environmental health disparities in the low-income Puerto Rican communities of western Massachusetts.

Heidi Diggelman
Università di Losanna Presidente Swiss National Science Foundation.
Professor Heidi Diggelmann graduated in medicine from the University of Berne in 1961. She continued her studies at numerous research establishments in Switzerland and the USA. From 1971 to 1991, Heidi Diggelmann worked at the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research in Lausanne, where she was in charge of the molecular biology department between 1977 and 1991. She has been a Professor at the University of Lausanne Medical Faculty since 1983, and headed the Insitute for Microbiology from 1991 to 2001. Professor Diggelmann has sat on various research bodies, including the ETH Board from 1990 to 1996. Since 1997, she has been President of the research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation.
http://www.snf.ch/default_en.asp

Barbara Duden
As a student of social history Barbara Duden was among the handful of Berlin women who in 1976 started COURAGE, a journal that despite the learned character of some of its contents sold from newspaper stands. Since then her writing and research have focused on the need to recognize the historical nature of the experienced body. At the time when "woman's body" finally emerged as a legitimate public issue, Duden called attention to the danger that this seeming liberation through science?based self-diagnosis, would further the dis-embodiment of women, rather than support their courage to affirm their own self-perceptions. She argued that only the rediscovery of the mode in which long-dead women felt their milk, blood, flushes, flows and lumpings could provide modern women with the necessary distance to distinguish between the functioning attributed to them by the physician, and their intuitive, self-reliant sense of flesh and blood.
In a first, major study, Duden tried to establish the legitimacy of "body" as a subject of professional history. From a large number of 18th century reports on medical visits two certainties emerged: the patients complained about a disorder in their humors and their directional fluxes, about emptiness, fullness or stoppages. It took time and courage to recognize this liquid, pulsating referent as that which today is called "my body". And it was also more surprising to recognize that the baroque physician, even when he had graduated from a university, identified mimetically with the patients narration, and that his prescription or dietetic counsel was meant to equilibrate, re-balance or re-orient humors. Empirically Duden had stumbled onto a blind spot of medical history: the transformation of the physician from a trained listener to an observer, the transformation of diagnosis from understanding to imputation.
The next major step of this "historical somatics" led further: An exhaustive collection and analysis of all printed anatomical texts that depict the content of the pregnant womb gave her the evidence, that - until the start of the 19th century - anatomists saw and drew what women told them: their woodcuts and etchings show the "coming child" that women expected, never something that resembles the entity that today is called "a foetus". The very fact that an aborted embryo was "out of human proportion" sufficed to judge it a "false fruit", a mole, an aberration of nature.
The documentation of the need to recognize only objects of appropriate proportions led her to a third step in the history of the body: the contrast between the senses in successive epochs: The history of the gaze, rather than the history of the eye's anatomy, the history of the quality that touch (hapsis) revealed or the ear heard allowed her to understand contemporary vision and hearing in a distanced way. Touch, hearing, sight or smell of the past appeared as "faculties" that relate the whole person to reality rather than as instruments that register it. This history of the senses is now culminating in the history of common sense, a "sense" that recognizes and judges the fit among perceptions. During the coming years Duden, the longest collaborator of Illich on the history of proportionality, proposes to verify as a historian his thesis that "the body" of the past ought to be entirely reconceptualized as the supreme and most concrete instance of relatedness.

Sarah Franklin
Professor of Social Studies of Biomedicine and Convenor of the MSc in Biomedicine, Bioscience and Society. Her research in the areas of assisted conception, embryo research, cloning, stem cells, and the new genetics has been the basis for numerous publications.
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/sociology/whoswho/franklin.htm

Elena Gagliasso
Associated Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Rome "La Sapienza". Her research area is located at the borders of contemporary epistemology: history of sciences and philosophy of science, ethical issues in scientific research, environment and environmetalism, issues on the relationship subject/object and informal languages. Actually she works on relations between body-objectivation theories and evolutionary developernental theory.She is a member of and teaches at the "Summer Specialization School of History and Philosophy of Biology". She is among founder members of "Interuniversitary Centrum of Research in History and Epistemology of Biosciences", of the board of CIRMS (Interdepartmental research on the methodology of iscientific research), and of the "Methaphor Club". She has been present in the Scientific Committees of the following journals: Ecologia politica, Rivistqa di Storia della Scienza, Sofia, Galileo Journal, (www.galileo.webzone.it).
http://w3.uniroma1.it/episteme/docenti/gagliasso.htm

Wendy Harcourt
Wendy Harcourt is Editor of Development, the quarterly journal of the Society for International Development and feminist researcher and activist based at the International Secretariat of the Society for International Development in Rome, Italy. She is currently Chair of Women in Development Europe. She has been working in international development since 1988 and is author of numerous articles, chapters and reports on difference facets of gender and development as well as editor of four collected books, the latest of which is Women and the Politics of Place with Arturo Escobar Kumarian Press 2005.
http://www.sidint.org/

Nancy Hawkins
Nancy Hawkins is an Assistant Professor at Simon Fraser University in the Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry in Canada. She obtained her PhD in Molecular Biology from Princeton University in 1996 and then spent several years in California doing postdoctoral research in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research has focused on investigating fundamental problems in developmental biology using simple model organisms. Currently, she is investigating the molecular mechanisms controlling asymmetric cell division in C. elegans, a small soil nematode. Her studies have identified a requirement for a gene pathway whose components are conserved in humans. In humans, misregulation of this pathway is one of the most common signaling abnormalities in cancer. She holds a University Faculty of Award (UFA) from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). The goal of the UFA program is to enhance the recruitment, retention and early career progression of women and Aboriginal people in tenure-track faculty positions. She also has an ongoing interest in promoting and encouraging young girls to pursue math and science. Currently, she is Vice President of Programs for the Society of Canadian Women in Science and Technology (SCWIST), a non-profit organization established to promote, encourage and empower women working in science and technology (www.scwist.ca). As part of SCWIST, she is actively involved with the ms infinity project; SCWIST’s flagship educational outreach program. ms infinity stands for “math + science = infinite options”. Its primary mandate is to establish and maintain educational programs for young women, to encourage and foster an interest in math and science, and provide education about the opportunities that math and science create.
http://www.sfu.ca/~nhawkins/

Qamar Rahman
Actual position: Dean Research & Development, Integral University, Lucknow, Emeritus Scientist: ITRC, Lucknow, Adjunct Professor: Hamdard University, Delhi , Expert Consultant: Dept. Pulmonary Medicine, King George Medical University, Lucknow.Visiting scientist in several institutions in the Usa and in Europe. Actively engaged in the research of chemical and biological aspects of the toxicity of occupational and environmental particulate air pollutants (fibres and particles) from the last 35 years.
Main research inerests:
Pulmonary Biochemistry.
Biochemical and molecular aspects of the toxicity of particulate air pollutants.
Genotoxicity.
Molecular epidemiology.

Significance of research work:
- Since lung is the first target fort the occupational and environmental air-born xenobiotics, the mechanism of toxicity of particulate air pollutants like silica, asbestos, asbestos substitutes, slate dust and ultra fine titanium dioxide, were elucidated.
- Diagnostic tests and screening methods were suggested.
- n-vitro and in-vivo model systems were developed to study the toxicity of fibers/particles.
- A metabolically active epithelial cell culture system was developed to screen the carcinogenecity of mineral fibers and to study the mechanism of their toxicity.
- A significant role of the silicon receptors in the environmental and evolutionary biochemistry was proposed.
- Toxicological evaluation of an asbestos substitute Wollastonite commercially used in India was conducted, which was found less toxic than Chrysotile asbestos.
- Appraisal of air pollution problems and a better understanding of pulmonary biochemistry were achieved.
- Methods were developed to study the molecular mechanisms of the toxicity of toxic fibers and particles at the DNA level. The mechanism of carcinogenic and co-carcinogenic behavior of asbestos was also elucidated to some extent using in vitro and in vivo model systems.
- The significance of oxidative stress induced by mineral fibers was highlighted, and dietary antioxidants were suggested.
- Studies using in vitro lymphocyte cultures, bone marrow tests in asbestotic animals, and in blood of asbestos exposed population proved that the chrysotile asbestos used in India is genotoxic.
- Specific chromosomal damages by toxic fibers/particles were shown using multicolor fluorescence in situ hybridization. Biomarkers for risk assessment were developed.
- The involvement of specific tumor suppressor genes and proto-oncogenes in human malignant mesothelioma was demonstrated using the latest techniques at the molecular level in the tissue of human subjects.
- In-depth-studies in asbestos-based industries were conducted and predisposing factors existing in Indian asbestos based units accelerating the disease process were pointed out.
- Risk assessment studies conducted for indoor air pollution in India.
- Risk assessment studies conducted highlighting Occupationally vulnerable population
- Studies Conducted on the toxicity of nanoparticles.

Teresa Rees
Professor of social sciences, Cardiff University, main research interest areas.
o Women and science policy in Europe
o Labour market analysis
o Higher education funding policy
She has have worked with a range of bodies and governments in Europe and elsewhere to apply a gender mainstreaming approach in the development of governance, education, training and labour market policies, regional economic development, the ‘knowledge economy’, social exclusion, transport and sport. Most recently her work has focused on women and science policies in Europe, a particular concern of the Research Directorate-General of the European Commission for whom I have acted as an expert adviser. She was rapporteur for a series of international groups of scientists commissioned by the EC to inform policies on recruiting, retaining and making the most of women in science, engineering and technology in the public and private sectors, and to benchmark national policies on women and science. She also assisted in work on ‘measuring excellence’ for the design of the 7th Framework Programme.
http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/schoolsanddivisions/academicschools/socsi/staff/acad/reest.html

Elettra Ronchi
is Co-ordinator of Health and Biotechnology Activities at the OECD, Directorate for Science, Technology and Industry. Elettra Ronchi holds a Ph.D. in molecular genetics and neuroendocrinology from the Rockefeller University/Cornell Medical School in New York, (US). She has held research, teaching and assistant appointments at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute of the Rockefeller University in New York, the University La Sapienza of Rome and at the Ecole Normale Superieure, in Paris. She has lectured and published extensively on topics linked to new developments in molecular genetics and biotechnology and their impact on health care systems.
Dr. Ronchi has acted as consultant and science adviser on biotechnology, health system management and technology transfer for human health to the United Nations and the OECD since 1992. In 1995 Dr. Ronchi joined the OECD to lead a programme of work on new emerging technologies related to human health, particularly new biotechnologies. Dr. Ronchi sits as expert and as OECD representative on a number of committees and advisory boards, including the UN Interagency Committee on Bioethics and the Bioethics Committee of the Council of Europe.
http://www.oecd.org/topic/0,2686,en_2649_34537_1_1_1_1_37437,00.html

Suman Sahai
Dr. Suman Sahai, who has had a distinguished scientific career in the field of genetics, was honored with the 2004 Borlaug Award for her outstanding contribution to agriculture and the environment. Dr. Sahai received her Ph.D. degree in genetics from the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in New Delhi. From 1981 to 1989, she served as a faculty member at the University of Alberta in Canada, University of Chicago in the U.S., and the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Dr. Sahai returned to India in 1989 and organized Gene Campaign, a non-governmental organization dedicated to protecting farmers’ rights and food and livelihood security. Gene Campaign which has played a key role in formulating Farmers’ Rights and fostering genetic and trade literacy among farmers and the general public, has been at the forefront of generating awareness on issues relating to trade, intellectual property rights, and genetic resources conservation and sustainable use.Dr. Sahai, who has published extensively in science and policy issues related to food security, has been working both at the grassroots and policy levels, with great dedication and considerable impact. She is a member of several national policy forums on international trade, biodiversity and environment, biotechnology and bioethics, intellectual property rights and research and education. She is a member of the National Biodiversity Board and serves on the Research Advisory Committees of national scientific institutions, the high-powered National Commission on International Trade and the Ethics Committee of the Indian Council of Medical Research.
http://www.genecampaign.org

Silja Samerski
She began with her studies at the University of Tuebingen in philosophy and biology. She earned her diploma in the department of human genetics with a thesis in population biology. While working on the genetic make-up of Madagascar monkeys, she became keenly aware of the ambiguity of technical language when it enters into everyday speech. Genetic and statistical terminology has a precise detonation for biologists. When, however, the same term appears as a part of ordinary conversations, it evokes innumerable connotations and becomes powerless to denote anything. This insight lead her to examine the havoc such escapees from the laboratory slang wreak in everyday langauge. Silja Samerski wrote her PhD in the Social Sciences taking genetic counseling as a paradigm for the popularization of genetic concepts. In these encounters a physician embeds textbook information and statistical tables in an exhortation that challenges his pregnant client to choose between different prenatal test options, basing her decision on the abstract information he has delivered. Inevitably, the demand to project such misplaced concreteness into the happening in her belly pushes the women into troubling misapprehensions. In a subsequent research project on the “pop-gene” she collaborated with Barbara Duden to study the meanings and connotations given to the word “gene” when it is used in everyday conversations. Silja Samerski is assistant professor at the Institut of Sociology and Social Psychology, University of Hannover (Germany).
http://www.pudel.uni-bremen.de/431dt_silja_samerski.html

Gillian Youngs
She has a background in news journalism and communications consultancy prior to the start of her full-time academic career in 1991. Her research and teaching reflect the range of her professional experience with a strong focus on theory-practice and policy-related issues. Her doctoral work considered the challenges to theories of the state presented by globalization and issues of inequality. This theme has continued through her research, which relates perspectives from the fields of international relations, global political economy and international communications, particularly in connection with new media and Internet developments. Her main research areas are: technology and power, globalization, global inequalities and development, gender and global restructuring, feminist international relations and political economy, feminist new media studies. I largely undertake applied theoretical work drawing on and interpreting the relationships between varied international data sets generated, for example, within the UN system, the OECD and diverse NGOs.She is member of the British International Studies Association, and the International Studies Association and have been elected as a member-at-large to the ISA Governing Council 2006-7.