'The "Artificial" and the "Natural" in the Life Sciences, c. 1850-1950'

The event is generously supported by Egenis, the University's Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology, the British Society for the History of Science and the British Society for the Philosophy of Science.Details of this are on the workshop website located at: http://exeter2014.wordpress.comThe conference programme (also available on the website) includes three plenary talks by the following invited speakers: Helen Curry (University of Cambridge), Jon Hodge (University of Leeds), and Joeri Witteveen (Universiteit Utrecht). There are multiple contributed papers including:Cellular Utopias: Protoplasm and Early Twentieth-Century Synthetic Biology (Robert Brain)Thomas Hunt Morgan and the invisible genes: using the artificial to discover the natural (Guilia Frezza and Mauro Capocci)Why Wild Type? Historical Understandings of Nature, Species and Variation and the Field-Lab Threshold' (Tarquin Holmes)Women, science and technical subjectivity in Britain c.1860-1900 (Tom Quick)Drawings, poetry, videos and embryology: from Haeckel to Garstang and beyond (Simon Rundle, John Spicer, and Oliver Tills)Additionally, there will be two forums, on the themes of Can experimental intervention be natural? and Towards a philosophy of variation. For more details contact James Lowe at jwel201 [at] ex.ac.uk