ethics news & views

Water, a play, and a visiting professor:
Feb events for Science & Society

The Program in Science & Society is proud to welcome John Krige, Kranzburg Professor in the School of History, Technology, and Society at Georgia Tech, to Emory this semester. Krige is the third Nat C. Robertson Distinguished Professor in Science & Society. He has a intriguing interdisciplinary background, having been a physical chemist in South Africa before becoming a historian of science and technology.

Krige will be spending the Spring semester at Emory teaching the lead seminar, "Science, Technology, and Society" in our new minor in Science, Culture, & Society (SC&S). This new minor complements the Ethics Minor the Center for Ethics initiated a two years ago.

The SC&S minor is unusual in its structure. Each year, ten to fifteen students will be accepted into the minor program, and then all will take the first seminar in it together. The initial seminar will be followed by any three courses with a science and society component already offered in the College, finishing with all the minors of that cohort together taking a capstone seminar centered around their own interdisciplinary research projects.

Krige’s current seminar will explore issues of science, ethics, technology, and gender. The course will complement two related events which students in the course will attend--and which are free and open to the public. Reservations are available through the Emory Box Office at (404) 727-5050.

The first event is a new play, Glory Enough, by Emory physicist Sidney Perkowitz, which debuts on Feb. 13 in the Math and Science Building Planetarium. Glory Enough dramatizes the story of Rosalind Franklin, who played a key role in unraveling the structure of DNA with Watson and Crick. The play explores themes of gender, ethics and science and will feature stage and television actress Karen Eris as Franklin. Both performances will be followed by a discussion with the playwright, actors, director, and Dr. Lynne Elkin, an expert on the Franklin story.

On Feb 14 the Center for Ethics, Science & Society, the Physics Department, the Center for Teaching and Curriculum, and the Georgia Tech Center for the Study of Women, Science, and Technology will sponsor a panel discussion, "Scientific Ethics, Proper Credit, and Gender" that will extend the issues in the play to science in general. This panel will be moderated in Cox Hall by Perkowitz, and will include myself, Krige, and Elkin. Reservations through the Emory Box Office are required for this event, which includes lunch and is free and open to the public.

Krige will also serve as moderator for a March 31-April 1 symposium, "Water in Our Lives." The symposium will examine local and international water issues from the perspectives of science, ethics, politics, religion, and education, and will feature as keynote speaker G. Wayne Clough, the President of the Georgia Institute of Technology, as well as several Emory, Georgia Tech, and other Atlanta-area scholars and citizen activists. For more information on this free public symposium, please see the Science & Society website.

[ Posted by Chance Hunter at February 3, 2005 11:04 AM | More Science, Ethics & Society articles ]

© 2000-2005 by the Center for Ethics, Emory University. Some rights reserved.