Blood Relations | Jenny Bangham

17:00 UK Time | 11 May 2021 | Online

gloknos and the Department of History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) at the University of Cambridge invite you to a panel discussion hosted by Dr. Jenny Bangham, around her new book Blood Relations: Transfusion and the Making of Human Genetics.

This event will feature discussion with:

Jenny Bangham (Queen Mary University of London)

Lochlann Jain (Stanford University)

Susan Lindee (University of Pennsylvania)

Elise Burton (University of Toronto)

Nick Hopwood (University of Cambridge)

More information, including registration details, will be made available soon. If you are interested in this event, please email the organisers to express interest.

Blood is messy, dangerous, and charged with meaning. By following it as it circulates through people and institutions, Jenny Bangham explores the intimate connections between the early infrastructures of blood transfusion and the development of human genetics. Focusing on mid-twentieth-century Britain, Blood Relations connects histories of eugenics to the local politics of giving blood, showing how the exchange of blood carved out networks that made human populations into objects of medical surveillance and scientific research. Bangham reveals how biology was transformed by two world wars, how scientists have worked to define racial categories, and how the practices and rhetoric of public health made genetics into a human science. Today, genetics is a powerful authority on human health and identity, and Blood Relations helps us understand how this authority was achieved.

Blood Relations: Transfusion and the Making of Human Genetics is published by the University of Chicago Press, and was supported by the Bevington Fund.

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Dr Jenny Bangham is a Wellcome University Award Lecturer at the Queen Mary University of London.

Jenny Bangham specialises in the history of medicine and the biomedical sciences. She is author of Blood Relations: Transfusion and the Making of Human Genetics (University of Chicago Press, 2020). With Emma Kowal and Boris Jardine she co-edited 'How Collections End: Objects and Loss in Laboratories and Museums' (BJHS Themes, vol. 4, 2019), and with Xan Chacko and Judith Kaplan is co-editing 'Invisible Labour: Power and Politics in Science' (Rowman and Littlefield, forthcoming).

She earned a PhD in biology at University College London, and worked as a laboratory geneticist in Edinburgh, where she developed an interest in the cultures and histories of science. She completed an MPhil and PhD in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, and worked at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, before joining the School of History at Queen Mary.

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Image: Sterile blood taking apparatus in metal box, association National Blood Transfusion Service, North London Blood Depot. Science Museum London. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence. No changes made beyond cropping.