03 Nov 2018 09:00 AM - 11:45 AM(America/Vancouver)
20181103T090020181103T1145America/VancouverOrganisms without Borders: Transnational Travel Stories of Practices, Data, and Standards
As well-documented in the history of biology, organisms have been used as experimental systems or even models to study a range of phenomena. This session goes beyond existing accounts to explore how various practices, data, and standards associated with use of many organisms have been articulated, negotiated, and evolved, using a series of contemporary case studies based in a variety of locales. The first paper examines neglected issues associated with the emergence of ethical standards for animal research in Australia, exploring the changing use of key concepts to excavate the influences of other Anglophone systems. The second paper utilizes novel visualization techniques to examine broader and local trends in organism use in developmental biology in the 1950s-1960s, thus permitting closer attention to contingencies that underlie continuities in organismal choice and to identify and investigate changes in biologists’ practices. The third paper analyzes challenges related to devising methods for sharing crop phenomic data across different international locations, including high-resourced and low-resourced research environments and different types of sites such as laboratories, experimental farms, and plant stations. The final paper investigates how non-standardized animals have come to be key experimental organisms for studying influenza, and how diverse global communities have articulated and negotiated experimental standards for working with them and making findings applicable to humans. A commentary from a biologist with extensive publications in history/philosophy of science will both deepen these historic reflections and promote dialogue between the papers.
Organized by Rachel Ankeny (University of Adelaide)
Ravenna A, Third FloorHistory of Science Society 2018meeting@hssonline.org
As well-documented in the history of biology, organisms have been used as experimental systems or even models to study a range of phenomena. This session goes beyond existing accounts to explore how various practices, data, and standards associated with use of many organisms have been articulated, negotiated, and evolved, using a series of contemporary case studies based in a variety of locales. The first paper examines neglected issues associated with the emergence of ethical standards for animal research in Australia, exploring the changing use of key concepts to excavate the influences of other Anglophone systems. The second paper utilizes novel visualization techniques to examine broader and local trends in organism use in developmental biology in the 1950s-1960s, thus permitting closer attention to contingencies that underliecontinuities in organismal choice and to identify and investigate changesin biologists’ practices. The third paper analyzes challenges related to devising methods for sharing crop phenomic data across different international locations, including high-resourced and low-resourced research environments and different types of sites such as laboratories, experimental farms, and plant stations. The final paper investigates how non-standardized animals have come to be key experimental organisms for studying influenza, and how diverse global communities have articulated and negotiated experimental standards for working with them and making findings applicable to humans. A commentary from a biologist with extensive publications in history/philosophy of science will both deepen these historic reflections and promote dialogue between the papers.
Organized by Rachel Ankeny (University of Adelaide)
The Function and Value of Animal Ethics Committees in Australia: Historical Perspectives and Current PracticesView Abstract Part of Organized SessionLife Sciences09:00 AM - 09:41 AM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 16:00:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 16:41:00 UTC
This paper considers how the current system of animal research regulation in Australia emerged within the cultural and political climate over the last four decades. This inquiry uses the development of the Australian code of practice for the care and use of animals for scientific purposes (the Code) as a framework for understanding changes in standards for animal research practices. This analysis traces the development of themes across the eight editions of the Code. Changes in the way important conceptual terms such as ‘animal,’ ‘pain,’ and ‘ethics’ are defined across the eight editions are used to analyze changes in attitudes and understandings. The Australian system of self-regulated Animal Ethics Committees is compared to the systems in place in the US, Canada. and the UK. This comparison explores the origins of Australia’s legislative framework, highlighting both disparate and parallel systems to determine the details of international influences on early policy making in Australia. Drawing on the voices of those directly involved, the regulatory system for animal research in Australia is critically evaluated to highlight the strengths and weaknesses that exist in the historic and current systems.
The Organismal Landscape in Developmental BiologyView Abstract Part of Organized SessionLife Sciences09:41 AM - 10:22 AM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 16:41:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 17:22:00 UTC
Using data from the General Embryological Information Service, we describe and analyze global trends in organism use during the 1950s and 1960s, visualized with topographic landscape diagrams. While the overall trend for developmental biology has been toward greater use of mammalian and avian systems, our visualization tools allow us to focus our analysis on specific research areas, such as fertilization or regeneration, where local trends show strong entrenchment of non-mammalian organisms. Juxtaposing these kinds of cases to the broader move toward mammalian systems, we suggest that the broader trend can be explained by a desire to make specific research problems more directly relevant to human biomedicine, while limited access to the phenomena in question played a key role in organismal entrenchment in specific research areas. Using organismal landscapes generated from the GEIS creates new opportunities to analyze the contingent factors that drive continuity and change in a biologist’s choice of research organism.
Phenomic Data between Local Fields and Global Databases: Developing Labels for Field Data Collection, 1990-2016View Abstract Part of Organized SessionLife Sciences10:22 AM - 11:03 AM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 17:22:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 18:03:00 UTC
The study of plant phenomics in the field involves complex efforts of data collection and analysis. There are countless parameters of potential relevance ranging from the information about the soil, relevant microbiomes, plants at different stages of development, changing climatic conditions and so forth; and no universal approaches to identifying and labelling relevant traits. This paper investigates attempts to share phenomic data about crops across different locations, and particularly between high-resourced and low-resourced research environments. I focus on the Crop Ontology, a digital infrastructure that was developed by an international network coordinated by researchers in Montpellier over the last decade to facilitate the sharing of information between plant scientists working in laboratories, experimental farms and plant stations in Europe, the United States, South America, Sub-Saharan Africa and various Eastern countries. I document the development of the Crop Ontology in relation to CassavaBase and YamBase, two “open” databases used to data from field trials carried out in West-Africa. On the basis of archival sources and interview material from the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture in Ibadan (Nigeria), I discuss how Crop Ontology curators confronted challenges relating both to the diversity of tools, terminologies, and variables used to describe widely diverse species in different parts of the world, and to the differences in expectations, goals, and working conditions among researchers and technicians involved in efforts of data collection.
Ferrets Here and There: Global Development of Experimental Practices for Influenza ModellingView Abstract Part of Organized SessionLife Sciences11:03 AM - 11:44 AM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 18:03:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 18:44:00 UTC
Since at least the 1930s, ferrets have been recognized as extremely well-suited models for studying the pathogenicity and transmissibility of both human and avian influenza viruses. Ferrets are attractive mammalian models due to their relatively small size and other physiological features including the similarity of their lungs to humans, but particularly because they evidence numerous clinical features associated with human disease, especially influenza. Ferrets are highly susceptible to the influenza virus, and have become indispensable for elucidating virus-host interactions following influenza virus infection. However, unlike many other more traditional model organisms such as mice, ferrets are not standardized and often are sourced from diverse types of locales. As a result, standardization occurs via the experimental procedures utilized, via complex negotiations amongst the relatively small community of researchers currently studying them. Using published literature and fieldwork, these processes are explored, with special attention to how practices travel (or fail to do so) between labs, and how arguments are made about the generalizability and applicability of experimental results, given the relative lack of standardization inherent in the experimental system.
Karina Burns