ISG faculty Bharat Venkat’s book At the Limits of Cure (Duke University Press, 2021) addresses the notion that in both scholarly and popular conversations, cure is frequently taken as an ending—of illness, treatment, and of suffering more generally. What if, instead, we were to approach cure through its limits; through its partiality and fragility; through the many ways in which it falls apart,…
Principal Investigator(s): Marcia Meldrum In the past 50 years, through the initiative and efforts of clinicians and staff, social workers, advocates, family members, and people with mental illness themselves, Los Angeles County has endeavored to help those lost in darkness to find their way back to secure and rewarding lives. But what has been done is not yet enough. Our…
Principal Investigator(s): Erik Gjesfjeld, Michael Alfaro, Christopher Kelty This project aims to utilize recent advancements in macroevolutionary research in order to develop new insights into the evolution of technology within both past and present societies. This includes understanding the complex processes that shape how new technologies are created, diversify and eventually go extinct. – “Competition and extinction explain the evolution…
Principal Investigator(s): Soraya de Chadarevian In the 1950s new microscope based techniques to visualize human chromosomes (the structures in the cell that carry genetic information), raised high hopes to distance the study of human heredity from discredited eugenic and racial practices and place it on a ‘solid scientific basis’. In the vision of its promoters the new approaches had implications…
Principal Investigator(s): Martie Haselton, Steve Cole Social isolation is associated with disease and mortality, as well as changes in immune cell gene expression, including upregulation of pro-inflammatory genes and downregulation of antiviral genes. Both transcriptional dynamics are likely to contribute to the health risks associated with social isolation. Despite strong interest in social relationships, transcriptional responses, and health, what remains…