Charis Thompson—professor and chair of the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley and associate director of the UC Berkeley Center for Science, Technology, and Medicine in Society—has spent her career engaging such bioethical concerns from a plethora of angles, situating the debate in its scientific, technical, moral, political, and financial ramifications. Her work explores the area in terms specific to stem cell research and its legislature, as well as to the bioethics of assisted reproductive technologies. As Thompson argues, social problems are increasingly funneled through questions of biomedicine, and so it has become the task of the bioethicist and the public alike to assess such problems within full view of the “choreography” of biology, society, and the individual, to the broad range of political and moral possibilities inherent in the development of technoscience.

Her presentation promises to be a powerful insight into the gendered divisions inherent in the institution of regenerative medical research.

Organized by the UCLA Center for the Study of Women