Is social technology new way to plug healthcare and food availability gaps for poor people?

Blog post  by Dinar Kale, Innogen OU (on Session 2A - The Role of Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) in New Agriculture and Health Technologies)

Food and health needs of low- and middle-income countries remains grossly under resourced in many areas. The 10/90 gap (Only 10% of global health research investment is directed towards 90% of global disease burden) is used to describe this global health challenge. A session on Private Public Partnerships (PPPs) at the recently held EGN conference highlighted role of PPPs in the development of new healthcare and agri-biotech technologies. The session showed that PPP as innovating organizational arrangement provides effective ways of mitigating issues associated with traditional private or public supported models of development. Session pointed out some key success factors. However it was quite evident from interactions after the session that the ‘PPP’ model does suffer from severe limitations.

Making Out the Promise of Synthetic Biology

Blog post by Heather Lowrie, Innogen (on Session 1B - Making Out the Promise of Synthetic Biology)

Visions of a biodigital future include the ability to engineer biology, synthesise novel living things and get biological products to do new jobs for us in smarter ways. Dr. Emma Frow from the Genomics Forum chaired a lively session asking: how plausible is this, and what concerns would accompany moves to take such products to market?

An anthropologist, and ethicist and a sociologist go into a bar…

Blog post by Claire Packman, Egenis (on Session 1A - How Does Life-Sciences Knowledge Circulate?)

No, they go into a panel at the EGN/OECD conference to explore, as chair Professor Steve Hughes put it, “three distinct framings of the question of knowledge production and circulation.” It’s an experiment,” he admitted happily. “We don’t know where this session will take us.”

Conference off to a cracking start..

Blog post by Dr. Steve Sturdy, Genomics Forum (on Plenary 1 - Knowledge Networks and Markets and Plenary 2 - Biodigital Futures: Informatisation and Convergence in the Life Sciences)

The conference got off to a cracking start this morning, with two plenary sessions opening up the key themes that will run through our discussions: first on Knowledge Networks and Markets (abbreviated by the speakers to KNMs), then on Informatisation and Convergence in the Life Sciences.