Les­ley A. Sharp (Barnard Col­lege and Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity), “Hybrid Bod­ies and Ani­mal Sci­ence: Moral Think­ing in Xeno­trans­plant Research”

• March 9, 3:30pm, Sav­ery 206

Abstract: In this lec­ture, Prof. Sharp will report on her more recent research among sci­en­tists who are actively work­ing to develop tech­niques for “xeno­trans­plan­ta­tion,” i.e. trans­plant­ing into human beings organs taken from other species. Xeno­trans­plan­ta­tion has been envi­sioned, by some, as a means of address­ing the “short­age” of avail­able organs, while avoid­ing some of the more trou­bling aspects of human organ donation.

Les­ley A. Sharp is a med­ical anthro­pol­o­gist on fac­ulty at Barnard Col­lege (Depart­ment of Anthro­pol­ogy) and Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity (Depart­ment of Anthro­pol­ogy and Sociomed­ical Sci­ences), whose work is con­cerned with crit­i­cal analy­ses of the sym­bol­ics of the human body. For the past two decades she has con­ducted ethno­graphic research on organ trans­plan­ta­tion, pro­cure­ment, and dona­tion in the United States. This work has focused espe­cially on med­ical ide­olo­gies, body com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion, and the trans­for­ma­tive prop­er­ties of organ trans­plants, specif­i­cally in ref­er­ence to the social con­struc­tion of the self. Her 2008 book, Strange Har­vest: Organ Trans­plants, Dena­tured Bod­ies, and the Trans­formed Self was awarded the New Mil­le­nium Book Prize by the Soci­ety for Med­ical Anthro­pol­ogy, given every other year to the book “judged to be the most sig­nif­i­cant and poten­tially influ­en­tial con­tri­bu­tion to med­ical anthro­pol­ogy.” More about Les­ley Sharp: https://anthropology.barnard.edu/profiles/lesley-sharp. More about Strange Har­vest: http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520247864

This event is gen­er­ously sup­ported by the Pro­gram on Val­ues in Soci­ety (in the Depart­ment of Phi­los­o­phy) as part of the “Crit­i­cal Med­ical Human­i­ties” lec­ture series. For more info con­tact jstaylor@uw.edu