Critical Genomics is a student initiative at Goethe University, which is organizing an interdisciplinary lecture series and a summer school on genomics.
It will take place from April to August of 2024 in Frankurt am Main.
Our aim is to create a time and place in which students from the humanities and from life sciences can educate each other through critical discussion of the field of genomics.
What is genomics?
Genomics is the big scale sequencing and analysis of genomes. It turns the information contained in the long molecule of DNA that is inside a cell into a digital form, which can be read, searched and analyzed by computers.
Why critical?
Genomics has great potential for scientific progress and insight. An example for that is how genomics has been used in the field of medicine to uncover the way some drugs work and finding new ways to treat patients.
Other exciting (but so far little known) uses of genomics has been in Archeology, where with increasingly better lab methods, it is now possible to sequence DNA from archeological sites, which gives us a further window into the past of humans and other life forms.
Yet this young discipline doesn't come without caveats. Its history is mixed up with that of Eugenics, which is a legacy we need to work through in order to recognize it, when it reappears in the present. Furthermore the persisting and revealing nature of digitized genomic information requires us to consider what this means for digital rights.
And as young aspiring academics and professionals we simply just have to do better than
