This remarkable theatre production took place in Liverpool tonight and is not to be missed if it comes to your city. It is performed by The Wired Aerial Theatre Productions. Here's a photo selection from the evening.
Wired magazine recently published one of my pictures of Stelarc in a feature on BioArt. Here's the image:
The photograph was taken at the Virtual Futures conference at Warwick University. For more photography, click here
Tom Degun from InsidetheGames.biz covers my keynote lecture at the University of Northampton Olympic conference, focusing on how Twitter has already caused challenges for the British Olympic Association. Click here, for more info.
Photos from the annual North West 2012 (#nw2012) annual conference, a meeting for regional stakeholders of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. It began with the LIPA Balloons project performance, captured here along with speakers at the event.
This week I gave a a keynote lecture at The Sports Leisure & Marketing Conference & Workshop 'Examining the global impact of the Olympics', taking place in Northampton on July 13th. The focus of my talk was new media, which reminded me of this Olympic pin from Sydney 2000 - still the coolest pin out there!
Here is my presentation"
Here are more details about the event.
Description: The University of Northampton, together with The Academy of Marketing and the Chartered Institute of Marketing, presents the The Sports Leisure & Marketing Conference & Workshop 'Examining the global impact of the Olympics'. This event is a uniquely designed forum for debate & discussion surrounding the impact of the London Olympics in 2012 and the burgeoning field of Sports Leisure and Marketing. Category: Event Host(s): Alan Seymour Contact Phone: 01604 892036 Contact E-mail: business@northampton.ac.uk Starts On: 13 Jul 2011 09:00 AM GMT Ends On: 13 Jul 2011 04:00 PM GMT Begin Registration: 04 May 2011 09:00 AM GMT End Registration: 06 Jul 2011 09:00 AM GMT Location: Park Campus Address: The University of Northampton Park Campus Boughton Green Road Northampton NN2 7AL Details/Directions: For full directions to Park Campus, please visit www.northampton.ac.uk/findus
New appointment to the reformed pioneering journal Teknokultura, now online Here are some of the other peopple on the board:
Editores
Heidi Figueroa Sarriera Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras
Ángel J. Gordo López UCM - Cibersomosaguas, España
Coordinadores Editoriales
Patrício Cabello Universidad Complutense de Madrid, España
Miguel A. Durán Universidad Complutense de Madrid, España
Rafael F. D. Heiber UCM - Cibersomosaguas, España
Consejo de Redacción
Lucila Finkel UCM - Cibersomosaguas, España
Albert García UCM - Cibersomosaguas, España
Ariel Jerez UCM - Cibersomosaguas, España
Andrés Lomeña UCM - Cibersomosaguas, España
Pilar Parra UCM - Cibersomosaguas, España
Javier de Rivera UCM - Cibersomosaguas, España
Igor Sábada UCM - Cibersomosaguas, España
International Board
Marta Aguilar Gil Universidad de Castilla la Mancha, España
Fernando Álvarez-Uría Universidad Complutense de Madrid, España
Antonio Bautista García-Vera UCM, España
Betty Bayer Hobart and William Smith Colleges, EE.UU
Rubén Blanco UCM, España
José María Bleda García Universidad de Castilla la Mancha, España
Erica Burman Manchester Metropolitan University, Reino Unido
Javier Bustamante Donás UCM, España
Heriberto Cairo Carou UCM, España
Blanca Callén UOC / Universitat Ramón Llull, España
Daniela Cerqui University of Lausanne, Suiza
Richard Cleminson Leeds University, Inglaterra
Mario Domínguez UCM, España
Javier Echevarría Universidad del País Vasco / EHU, España
Adolfo Estalella CSIC, España
Gabriel Gatti Universidad del País Vasco / EHU, España
Graciano Gómez López Arnaiz UCM, España
Chris Hables Gray The Union Institute CA/ Stanford University, EE.UU
Donna Haraway University of California at Santa Cruz, EE.UU
Lupicinio Íñiguez-Rueda UAB, España
Steve Jones University of Illinois at Chicago, EE.UU
Arturo Lahera Sánchez UCM, España
Amparo Lasén UCM, España
Ángel Melguizo Esteso OCDE, Francia
Steven Mentor Evergreen Valley College, EEUU
Andy Miah West Scotland University, Escocia
Carl Mitcham Colorado Golden Mines, EE.UU
Marisela Montenegro Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, España
Sonia Núñez Puente Universida Rey Juan Carlos, España
Dimitris Papadopoulos Cardiff University, Reino Unido
Ian Parker Manchester Metropolitan University, Reino Unido
Jaime Pastor UNED, España
Mark Poster University of California, Irvine, EEUU
Carlos Prieto UCM, España
Joan Pujol Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, España
Juan Carlos Revilla UCM, España
Miguel Romero Baeza Viento Sur, España
Laura de Salazar Fernández Empresa Social Noise, España
Victor Sampedro Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, España
José Antonio Sanahuja UCM, España
Francisco Seoane Pérez Leeds University, Reino Unido
Maria Amparo Serrano UCM, España
David Silver University of San Francisco, EEUU
Francisco Tirado Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, España
Carlos del Valle Universidad de la Frontera, Temuco, Chile
Jan de Vos Universidad de Gante, Bélgica
Langdon Winner Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, EEUU
New publication in this book by Simon Cottle and Libby Lester. The book chapter is written with Ana Adi and titled: Open Source Protest: Human Rights, Online Activism and the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.
Reference:
Adi, A. & Miah, A (2011) Open Source Protest: Human Rights, Online Activism and the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games., in Cottle, S. and Lester, L. Transnational Protest and the Media. Peter Lang Publishers.
Here's an excerpt from our Conclusion:
In a global, digitally mediated world, there are various dimensions of contemporary protest culture that require our reconsideration. First, the expansion of communication technology permits local concerns to reach a global audience with considerable immediacy who, in turn, may also actively shape their reception. A good example of this is the celebrity Stephen Fry’s1 re-tweeting of content related to the Iran election concerns of 2009 (McElroy, 2009). In this case, a celebrity’s sharing of content and active interpretation of what was taking place thus becomes a primary frame around the issue at hand. This is a clear example of a celebratory acting both as an activist, cultural intermediary, and journalist.
An open media culture means devolving some control over one’s ‘brand’ or agenda and permitting the community of followers to own and shape its development. This transition presupposes a shared value system, against which people may act and, while it is not difficult to imagine such common ground in some cases, such as the world economy or climate change, it will require considerable work to ensure that local concerns have the kind of relevance for a global audience that would lead to support, rather than audience apathy. This may require local communities to compromise on their issues for a wider audience in order to optimize the profile of their concerns. For example, protests about local housing policy injustice may seek an alliance with other such communities in other parts of the world.
Second, the rise of transnational concerns means that protests against the institutions that do business across borders will find themselves under greater scrutiny by even greater advocacy groups. Thus, the growing monopolization of global companies creates a series of tensions for both politicians and user communities. Such challenges were reflected in the 2010 dispute between China and Google over uncensored search engines, which demonstrated that such a universally shared view about media freedom and access to information is not yet apparent. The debacle gave rise to considerable acts of protest over China’s Internet laws.
More familiar examples of transnational protests have arisen in the context of fair-trade or ethical trade products, or concerns about the child labour. Of course, in the context of the Olympics, this has particular relevance, since its financial base is supported by some of the world’s biggest brands, such as McDonald’s, Visa, Lenovo, Coca-Cola, etc. From one perspective, the Olympic Games functions as a device to make such companies more publicly accountable – for example by adhering to the IOC’s environmental policies - and so one may argue that the Olympics is an arbiter of activist concerns. Yet, the broader social concerns about how such companies may benefit from a mega-event that many members of the public believe should be free from corporate interests, deems that this mechanism of building greater corporate responsibility may not always be a primary value for the general public.
Finally, a global, digital era requires us to interrogate what counts as activism or protest. While we strongly advocate the idea that even the most minimal gesture online should qualify – such as sharing a website address via the social networking platform Twitter – it will be necessary to consider strategically how different forms of activism lead to different results. Clearly, what arises from a Web 2.0 era of user-generated content is the capacity to build capacity and impact from the ground up. This is why a powerful web community can out perform a large transnational company in such terms as Google rankings and general visibility, as is typified by viral marketing campaigns. Yet, it remains to be seen whether digital activism – or hacktivism – can generate a significant impact without the involvement of traditional media. Of course, as a campaign escalates, there comes a point where the traditional media become an integral part of the cycle of news syndication, so these are incredibly difficult phenomena to analyze. Nevertheless, further research can study the interaction of traditional and online journalism to better gauge how convergence - a term that was applied to media systems in the 1990s - has reached the level of protest culture. In the Olympics, we suggest that this is already apparent.
Book Synopsis
In what ways can mediated transnational protests express, however emergently or imperfectly, «global civil society» and «global citizenship»? How, in an increasingly fragmented and multilayered communications environment, can they contribute to a «global public sphere»? This book explores these and other major questions, examining protests and their transactions within and through today's complex circuits of communications and media worldwide. With contributions from leading theorists and researchers, this cutting-edge collection discusses protests focusing on war and peace, economy and trade, ecology and climate change, as well as political struggles for civil and human rights, including the Arab uprisings. At its core is a desire to better understand activists' innovative uses of media and communications within a rapidly changing media environment, and how this is altering relations of communication power around the globe.
New publication in the Encyclopedia of Nanosciecne and Society, SAGE. Miah, A. (2011) Bioethics, in Guston, D. Encyclopedia of Nanoscience & Society, SAGE Reference. Here's the pre-print:
Bioethics, by Andy Miah
Bioethics broadly describes the philosophical analysis of moral dilemmas, which arise from the development and application of biological and life sciences, often through such practices as medicine. Bioethics became a formal academic discipline in the late 1960s developed through such institutions as The Hastings Center, which formalized research within academic journals and books. However, principles of bioethical concern have been apparent in a range of social practices for centuries.
Twentieth century bioethics was dominated by a global effort to protect human subjects from exploitative practices. In the post world-war II era, these interests focused on governmental experimentation, but quickly expanded to include a range of institutionalized practices that affect individuals and communities, including the military, elite sport, health care and employment. Theoretical approaches to bioethics in this era were characterized by a top-down derivation of principles, which aimed to provide overarching guidelines through which to codify ethical practice. Subsequently, bioethical theory critiqued the decontextualized approach of principle-based ethics and emphasized the complexity of real-world ethical decision making by developing a bottom-up or case-based (casuistry) approach. However, broadly speaking, approaches to bioethics encompass three main forms of moral reasoning 1) consequentialism (concerned primarily to maximize good outcomes) 2) deontology (concerned with the obligations we hold) and 3) virtue theory (concerned with what kind of character good people should have).
At the turn of the millennium, bioethical debates focused on the rise of genetics, as the Human Genome Project neared completion. The application of genetic science through screening, testing or transfer generated numerous public controversies about ‘designer’ organisms and led to the emergence of new biotechnological industries. Specialist inquiries into the emergence of genomics, genetically modified foods and a greater awareness about gene-environment interactions, slowly gave rise to a post-genomic scientific view and a resistance to genetic exceptionalism within bioethical research. To this end, attempts to establish a distinct sub-discipline of genethics have been largely inconsequential.
In this context, twenty first century bioethics faces a number of transformations. Primarily, there is a growing fragmentation of ethical communities (research and practice), which is giving rise to new terminologies, such as nanoethics or neuroethics. This fragmentation has been evident for some years through the overlapping ground between bioethics and medical ethics or environmental ethics. However, it is evident that this fragmentation will continue to grow through more specialist inquiries into subjects that include, for instance, the emerging subjects of information ethics, or the ethics of outer space.
Each of these sub-disciplines emphasizes the importance of transdisciplinary approaches to bioethics, which draw heavily on philosophy, law, sociology, political science, for instance. The fragmentation of bioethics is also amplified by convergence in the biosciences that operates around nanoscience. This process raises new questions about how to develop bioethical theory in a way that can accommodate new scientific practices. A corollary of these shifts is a growing sophistication in the bioethical method, which has begun to encompass narrative studies, feminist approaches to bioethics, cultural theory and aesthetics.
A final challenge to bioethics is the proliferation of new kinds of ethically engaged community and new interest groups, which themselves are altering the political landscape of bioethical debate. Prominent examples of this include discussions about human enhancement, as medical technologies increasingly make possible the ability to make humans ‘better than well’ (Kramer, 1994). It also encompasses the ethics of life or health extension, which arises as a direct consequence of attending to age-related disease. Many of these discussions have been taken up within a range of governmental advisory contexts, such as the United States President’s Council on Bioethics or the European Parliament.
As bioethics evolves, its proximity to public policy has grown and various bioethical communities may be seen as lobby groups on behalf of specific ethical positions, such as the Comment on Reproductive Ethics (CORE) in the United Kingdom. The challenge for nanoscience will be to define unique questions about the distinct terrain of nanoethics, while accommodating the widespread
Andy Miah
SEE ALSO: nanoethics, medical ethics
References
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Fritz Allhoff, Patrick Lin, James Moor and John Weckert, Nanoethics: The Ethical and Social Implications of Nanotechnology (New Jersey, Wiley and Sons, 2007); Thomas L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, 6th ed. (New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008); Deborah G. Johnson, “Ethics and Technology 'in the Making': An essay on the challenge of Nanoethics” Nanoethics 1: 21-30, 2007). Helga Kuhse and Peter Singer, A Companion to Bioethics (Oxford, Blackwell Publishers Ltd: 15-23, 1998); Peter Kramer Listening to Prozac (London, Fourth Estate, 1994); Thomas H. Murray, Genetic Exceptionalism and 'Future Diaries': Is Genetic Information Different from Other Medical Information? Genetic Secrets: Protecting Privacy and Confidentiality in the Genetic Era. M. A. Rothstein. (New Haven, Yale University Press: 60-73, 1997)
The 23rd June every year is Olympic Day. This is a day that is recognized by the International Olympic Committee and supported by National Olympic Committees, which undertake a number of activities to commemorate the Olympic Movement. I was in Liverpool and happened upon the LloydstTSB Olympic Torch display - a touring exhibition of previous torches. It made me think that LloydsTSB have made a successful ambush of Samsung's Olympic Torch Relay which will occur next year. Of course, it is an exhibtion with approval from LOCOG and Coca-Cola's / Samsung's privileges do not really come into place until the relay begins. Still, the fact that it is a touring exhibition with destinations all over the UK makes an association unavoidable.
For more information about Olympic Day, here's some text from the IOC website:
Symbolic anniversary
Olympic Day was introduced in 1948 to commemorate the birth of the modern Olympic Games on 23 June 1894 at the Sorbonne in Paris. The goal was to promote participation in sport across the globe regardless of age, gender or athletic ability.
A growing, global gathering
Over the last 20 years Olympic Day has been associated with Olympic Day Runs all over the world. From 45 participating National Olympic Committees (NOCs) in the first edition in 1987, the numbers have grown to nearly 200 participating NOCs. What’s more, many of the participating NOCs are in Africa – proving the event’s worldwide appeal.
The Olympic Day Run owes a debt of gratitude to the support provided by McDonald's, which in 2003 became worldwide partner to the event.
Move, learn, discover
Olympic Day is nowadays developing into much more than just a sports event. Based on the three pillars “move”, “learn” and “discover”, National Olympic Committees are deploying sports, cultural and educational activities. Some countries have incorporated the event into the school curriculum and, in recent years, many NOCs have added concerts and exhibitions to the celebration. Recent NOC activities have included meetings for children and young people with top athletes and the development of new web sites directing people to programmes in their neighbourhood.
This retro conference took place at Warwick University on June 18-19 and was a real blast, with many of the the old guard of the cyberculture years returning to Warwick to revisit the Internet era. I gave one of the plenary talks and enjoyed meeting new people whom i've read for many years and catching up with some familiar folk. There was a lot of discussion about the intersections of biology and digital technology and my talk was titled 'There's nothing virtual about the future' and addressed the way in which life online has been theorized as non-space. Here's a link to the website and here's the prezi talk. My laptop died on the way to the conference, so an analogue/digital love story was inevitable...
Photos from the event
for Virtual Futures, Warwick University, 2011.
The Cheltenham Science Festival is a remarkable experience and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I was involved with 4 events and there only 2 nights, but also managed to catch a lot of other events. Here's a photo summary, followed by a Flickr Set.
Greg Foot, Science Daredevil (the next Brian Cox)
Professor Jim Al-Khalili, Physicist Extraordinaire
Professor Lord Robert Winston, Godfather of British Science Communication
Professor Kathy Sykes, Festival Director
Professor Mark Lythgoe, Festival Director
Alan Moore, Watch Man
Iain Sinclair, Psychogeographer
Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, not Ali G, the other one
and here's the full Flickr Set with many more people...
Today's event at @CheltSciFest was a blast #cheltscifest. I focused my talk around my 5 categories of human enhancement. Here's the prezi. Great discussion.
Claims that Craig Venter ‘created life’ may have been overblown, but humans can now go beyond tinkering with genetics and build a new organism from components. How is this possible – and how should we approach our new-found powers? Adam Rutherford, ethicist Andy Miah and social scientist Jane Calvert tackle the tricky ethical questions thrown up by what some would call an extension of biology and others suspect is ‘playing God’. To coincide with a Nuffield Council on Bioethics consultation on emerging biotechnologies, this debate at the Cheltenham Science Festival will consider the ethical issues raised by synthetic biology. Adam Rutherford, ethicist Andy Miah and social scientist Jane Calvert (member of the Nuffield Council Working Party on emerging biotechnologies) tackle the tricky ethical questions thrown up by what some would call an extension of biology and others suspect is ‘playing God’.
Here's a copy of my presentation:
Biographies
Following a degree in evolutionary biology Adam Rutherford completed a PhD in the genetics of the eye. Now Adam is an editor of science journal Nature. Adam recently presented BBC4 series “Cell” covering 4 billion years of evolution from the very first cell to the future of life itself.
Andy Miah is Director of the Creative Futures Research Centre within the Faculty of Business and Creative Industries at the University of the West of Scotland. His research focuses on questions concerning the future of humanity and which require transdisciplinary research solutions.
Jane Calvert is a social scientist and Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, based in the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Innogen Centre. Jane's broad area of research is the sociology of the life sciences.
photographs from Leicester's Community Media week, where I gave a brief overview of the East Midland's role in #media2012. great day.
Miah, A. (2011) Biotechnology, Bioethics & Bioart, in Future : Content, It’s Nice That.
IN RECENT YEARS, bioartist and biodesigners have begun to infiltrate scientific laboratories in the name of creative expression and new knowledge. Their number includes some of our best avant-garde artists, whose core currency is the playful and sometimes political exploration of new media through which to create art that will change our way of seeing the world. Yet, there is a great deal more at stake, as I will endeavour to explain.
In the past, the medium of such artists might have been oil paint, water colours, or in more recent years, film, video, or digital technology. Today, their medium is biology – our biology to be more precise, and that of other species. However, their work does not simply derive from our present, post-genomic era; it also foregrounds what comes next. They conduct sociologies of the future, shaping the ideas of science fiction writers, film makers, and the work of scientists. By envisioning new forms of biological transformation and utilization, their ideas become constitutive of our era, in the way that artists before them did.
To this end, we may conclude that bioart and biodesign also scrutinizes contemporary bioethical issues and scientific practice, such as the utilization of embryonic stem cells, or the development of transgenic species. However, it is far from clear that the intention of such artists is to resist such processes. Indeed, some are seeking their development in order to make their art possible, such as Stelarc, the long-standing performance artist who regularly alters his body for his art.
Beginning with live body hook suspensions in the 1970s, Stelarc’s most recent enterprise involves creating an ear on his forearm, grown from a cell culture and sculptured over a period of six years. The next stage for this work is the utilization of stem cells to create the precise ridges of the ear that only nature has been capable of perfecting, so far.
If this were not evidence enough of how artists celebrate the transformative aesthetic potential of biotechnology, then consider the subsequent stage of Stelarc’s Extra Ear. The end goal of the project is to implant an auditory device within the ear and for it to be remotely connected to the Internet, so web browsers can hear what the ear hears creating a distributed auditory system.
Other artists, such as Ionat Zurr & Oron Catts from Australia are scrutinizing the need for us to farm animals, at a time when environmental activists point out the amount of energy needed to sustain one animal life – and indeed, the harmful gases generated by such life forms! As an alternative, they have developed something called victimless meat, grown from cell cultures, which has the neat consequence of also attending to animal rights concerns, since there is no sentient life to speak of that is harmed by the consumption of such products.
Of course, biology has been a medium for artists for some time. Everything from saliva to human excrement has entered the play space of artists over the years. The difference in these new works is their experimentation with cutting edge scientific applications, such as stem cells, cosmetic surgery and biotechnology generally – technologies that are at the margins of human experience and about which there is considerable controversy.
The resulting works vary considerably and they range from the weird and wonderful, such as Eduardo Kac’s fluorescent, transgenic bunny, to the sublimely curious such as Julia Reodica’s designer hymens, a collection of synthetic hymens, which invite questions into the role of virginity and its loss in the 21st century. Alternatively, Yann Marussich’s whole-body secretion of a blue dye in a piece of live art called ‘blue remix’ heralds a new era of performance. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVSPw1XrRK0].
These artists have varied intentions and, like all good work, their art invites numerous and sometimes contradictory responses. It would be a mistake to suggest that they are pursuing anti-scientific ideologies, since this would radically limit the willingness of scientists to open their doors to such practice. Instead, the emphasis is on collaboration and shared vision, about nurturing new ways of interrogating the end goals of science as the utopian visions of humanity.
However, one can read a deeper politics into such desires. Their gentle tip toeing into labs raises important questions about how we organize society and understand our own humanity. For instance, why do we privilege scientific knowledge over, say, aesthetic, as evidenced by the way in which funding is skewed in favour of the former?
Would we have been better off over the last 100 years or so if we’d spent more of our research funds on the so-called softer sciences? Would we have asked different questions, or sought different solutions to difficult problems? We might have saved fewer lives and, perhaps failed to reduce suffering as effectively as we have through medicine, but then with fewer people on the planet, we might have been more effective at distributing goods more evenly.
The work of these bioartists and designers also raises difficult ethical questions. For instance, it requires us to consider by what codes of ethics such work should be governed? This is often the initial response of critics who find such work disturbing, offensive or potentially illegal: how could one play with transgenic science simply to create a new aesthetic artefact? However, there are good reasons for refraining from such judgements and this is because the aesthetic content of such works is only one way of evaluating their worth.
The more relevant ethical view to take reveals itself when inquiring into some of the challenges that such artists have faced in the pursuit of their work. For instance, in 2004, US bioartist Steve Kurtz was pursued by the FBI under suspicion of bioterrorism, after petri dishes with biological matter inside them were found in his home.
Such artists would want us to see them as acting on our behalf to make science more accountable to a broader public and for their work to engage us more fully on its long term goals and aspirations.
So, the transgenic art of Eduardo Kac asks us to consider the limits of ‘Playing God’ and he is quick to point out that scientists have already undertaken such experiments, we just don’t hear very much about it, or it is cloaked in some remote chance that the experiment will lead to knowledge that will assist humanity in some specific way. In any case, if one wanted to read Kac's fluorescent bunny as the next era of personalised pets, what should be our objection? Doesn’t our desire for pets necessarily commit us to their objectification and servitude, even though we might claim they are our companions?
In the end, if we are to experiment with creating new forms of life with synthetic biology, cloning and genetic modification, shouldn’t we just admit that it is for little more than our own amusement, whether that is the amusement of our own existence, or that which we find in witnessing great art?
In June, I'll be speaking at the Cheltenham Science Festival in 4 events. Also, I have written an editorial for the programme, which discusses Factor X and the future of humanity. Here's a link and here's more info about the events wher I'll be speaking: Ethics of Synthetic Biology (8th June, 1830) Biology is being thought of in a whole new way – as a bunch of parts that can be engineered to create ‘synthetic’ biological things. But what does that mean? And should we be playing God with nature or can we think of biological bits as any other building material? Adam Rutherford, ethicist Andy Miah and social scientist Jane Calvert introduce us to synthetic biology and what it can do for us, and discuss some of the controversial questions it raises.
X MEN Vs BIONIC WOMEN (9th June, 1430) When we talk about doctors making us better we usually mean they give us back our health. But what if engineers and scientists could really make us better, better than we’ve ever been before? Faster, smarter, stronger than nature could manage, for example. Hear from biomedical engineer John Fisher and neuroscientist Barbara Sahakian about how much that could soon be possible, and from ethicist Andy Miah about the new dilemmas such technologies could bring.
Science Question Time (9th June, 5-6pm) Science cafe style event, considering questions of the week.
WHAT MAKES A CHAMPION? Thursday 9th June 8.30-9.30pm Our genetic heritage determines whether we have the right body to become a sporting champion, but raw talent alone is unlikely to win an Olympic gold medal. What are the mental challenges facing elite athletes? How has technology allowed us to swim, cycle and run faster? Former table tennis champion and journalist Matthew Syed, sports engineer Steve Haake and Scott Drawer from Sports UK uncover what makes successful sports stars rise above their competitors.
In advance of next week's #media2012 meeting, here's the latest version of the media blueprint for London 2012, published for the #media2012 community.
Citation is:
Miah, A. (2011) Media Blueprint for 2012, v1.2, Published by #media2012, Available online at http://www.media2012.org.uk