First kite flight on UK Campus

This is a video taken from our helikite on the UK campus, August 2013. It was the first launch. We are using a a helium-filled kite manufactured by Allsop Helikites and a GoPro camera.

Postgenomic spoof ads

How we think about parasites in the developed world. These slides were initially part of my paper presentation at the 2013 Dimensions of Political Ecology conference at the University of Kentucky. Helminth therapy involves the use of intestinal parasites like hookworm to treat autoimmune diseases of the digestive track. This application of evolutionary medicine has proven very effective. The basis for its success is that our hypersterilized environments and the lack of parasites trigger disease. This advert suggests how the production of evolutionary medicine might play out in other ways, and indeed there is already a market in DIY parasite treatments. Nonetheless, the irony in this advert is that while we may see hookworms as a means to cure disease, they remain a pervasive scourge in many parts of the developing world.

Postgenomic spoof ads

Your microbiome is better than mine. Can I buy it? While bioprospecting was once external to our bodies, with postgenomics and the mapping of human microbiomes, bioprospecting is turning simultaneously into bodies and their interactions with the environment as a source of capitalization. Microbiomes of people living in more rural settings may have microbiomes that counter diseases associated with affluence and development. Obesity, for example, may be related to the kinds of bacteria in our microbiome.See the movie review for Antiviral.

Postgenomic spoof ads

Fetishizing the microbiome. Writing in the New York Times Magazine this summer, Michael Pollan acknowledged that the bacteria in his poop were decidedly non-Western in composition, no doubt to his enviable diet.

Postgenomic spoof ads

We make space simple. Douglas Richardson, Mei-Po Kwan, and Michael Goodchild had an article published in Science in 2013, entitled “The Spatial Turn in the Health Research”. Postgenomics is indeed spatial. It is the spatialization of the human genome. Yet is there anything problematic regarding the extent can we map the the exposure spaces of humans that lead to disease and negative health outcomes? Would we map it for a given set of humans? Which humans? Who gets to participate? Is such a program realistic? Reductionist? Biologically limited but nonetheless worthy of pursuing?