Brian Balmer
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 89103 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Brian Balmer |
| PRENOMES | Brian |
| SOBRENOME | Balmer |
| ASSINATURA | BALMER B |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8130-8423 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 22 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 67 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 21 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1994 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2021 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Intelligence, Ignorance, and Diplomacy in the Cold War
Drawing on perspectives from “ignorance studies,” this article examines a case of multiple types of expertise and ignorance within the geo-political context of the Cold War. It revisits a suspected breach of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). In 1979, an outbreak of anthrax occurred in the Russian city of Sverdlovsk, killing numerous people; Sverdlovsk was also the site of a military facility suspected by the West of undertaking biolog…
Shadow Values and the Politics of Extrapolation
The Effect of Transport Accessibility on the Social Inclusion of Wheelchair Users
In recent years the accessibility of London buses has improved with the introduction of ramps and wheelchair priority areas. These advances are meant to remove physical barriers to entering the bus, but new conflicts have arisen particularly over the physical space aboard. We aimed to research the barriers faced by wheelchair users in public transport using a mixed methods approach to establish the breadth of issues faced by wheelchair users. To …
Secrecy and Science
It is no secret that twentieth-century Britain was governed through a culture of secrecy, and secrecy was particularly endemic in military research and defence policy surrounding biological and chemical warfare. More generally, it is hard to exaggerate the role of secrecy in all past biological and chemical warfare programmes and several recent historical surveys of biological and chemical warfare research have emphasised that all state sponsored…
Ignorance is strength?
This chapter discusses the challenge of knowing about what is purposefully rendered difficult to know about matters of defense, intelligence and security. In the light of this challenge, the chapter seeks to develop an appreciation of how commentators across varied disciplines characterize the relation between knowledge and ignorance in matters associated with intelligence, security and national secrecy. It explores how ignorance can become a res…
Absence in Science, Security and Policy
This book explores the absent and missing in debates about science and security. Through varied case studies, including biological and chemical weapons control, science journalism, nanotechnology rese
Preventing ‘A Virological Hiroshima’
This article examines representations of biological weapons during a crucial period in the recent history of this form of warfare. The study draws on a corpus of newspaper articles from the US New York Times and the UK Times and Guardian written around the time of the negotiation period of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, the international treaty banning this form of warfare. We argue that a conventional discourse can be found wherein biol…
Life as Surplus
Melinda Cooper, Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era, Seattle, University of Washington Press, 2008, 208 pp., $25.00 (paperback), ISBN 9780295987910 A landmark step i
Keeping Nothing Secret
After renouncing an offensive chemical warfare programme in 1956, the UK Cabinet Defence Committee decided in 1963 to re-acquire a chemical warfare retaliatory capability. This article describes how the re-acquisition decision was engendered by a combination of novel research findings, changes in strategic thinking, new intelligence and pressures from NATO. Despite the 1963 decision, no new chemical weapons capability was acquired by the UK and i…
Constructing a safe research environment
This paper analyses how talk between researchers and their volunteer human subjects works to construct a safe and supportive environment in a laboratory setting where women volunteers participate in the development of a new imaging technology with potential for diagnosing breast cancer. Drawing on discourse analysis perspectives, we explore the work talk has to do in order to facilitate the instrumental, ethical and social dimensions of the inter…
The Royal Society and the ‘brain drain’
Although concerns about the loss of British scientists to the USA and elsewhere grew slowly throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, the Royal Society's 1963 report on the emigration of scientists sparked a very public debate about the ‘brain drain’. This paper concentrates on the Society's key role in creating focus and impetus for the debate through the report and questionnaire survey that informed it. In this engagement with social science resear…
The Anatomy of the Brain Drain Debate, 1950–1970s
This witness seminar on the brain drain debate 1950-70s was held on 23 May 2006 in the JZ Young Lecture Theatre, University College London. It was organised by the Department of Science & Technology Studies, UCL, as part of a research project on the Brain Drain debate funded by the ESRC. The witnesses included Prof Ron Bullough (formerly Atomic Energy Research Establishment Harwell and interviewer for British recruitment boards in North America);…
Home on the Range
This article introduces the special issue on middle-range theory in science and technology studies (STS), providing the background to its production and reviewing different notions of "middle." It begins with Merton's ideas about middle-range theory as a way of moving beyond the production of either descriptions or theories of everything. Instead of seeing the middle as the space between the theoretical imagination and the detailed depiction of e…
A Secret Formula, a Rogue Patent and Public Knowledge about Nerve Gas
What makes knowledge dangerous? How does secrecy operate to help produce knowledge that is dangerous or otherwise? What happens when ‘nothing happens’? This paper addresses these questions through a case study in the history of chemical weapons research in the UK. It focuses on the publication and subsequent treatment in 1975 of a newspaper article reporting that the patent on the chemical warfare agent, VX, was available in a number of public li…
Volunteer human subjects' understandings of their participation in a biomedical research experiment
How does an accident become an experiment? Secret science and the exposure of the public to biological warfare agents
During the Cold War, British scientists carried out a clandestine programme of research aimed at developing an anti‐personnel biological weapon comparable in effect and strategic importance with th
Biological warfare
The story of work on biological warfare in the twentieth century is briefly reviewed and the history of the British programme analyzed, largely from documents now available in the Public Records Office. The position of the United Kingdom in relation to other military and political issues has varied, as has its overall attitude from time to time. In the 1930s a defensive stance was linked to the health effects of conventional war. During and after…
Killing `Without the Distressing Preliminaries
Improving Nature? The Science and Ethics of Genetic Engineering, by Michael J. Reiss and Roger Straughan; Birth to Death
The drift of biological weapons policy in the UK 1945–1965
Managing Mapping in the Human Genome Project
It is usual in science studies to focus attention on either science policy or laboratory practices. This paper examines the mutual shaping of science and policy through the case of the Human Genome Mapping Project in the UK. It is argued that the evolution of policy was not merely a series of administrative choices. The strategies, boundaries and accounting methods of the programme, together with the organization and conception of research among …
Gene Mapping and Policy-Making
This paper examines various unsuccessful attempts by Australian geneticists to become involved in the international Human Genome Project. Several attempts were made by various scientists to gain support for organized gene mapping through the National Health and Medical Research Council, the Department of Industry, Technology and Commerce and the Cooperative Research Centres funding scheme. Different expectations of the role of science in each cas…
Volunteer human subjects' understandings of their participation in a biomedical research experiment
Managing Mapping in the Human Genome Project
It is usual in science studies to focus attention on either science policy or laboratory practices. This paper examines the mutual shaping of science and policy through the case of the Human Genome Mapping Project in the UK. It is argued that the evolution of policy was not merely a series of administrative choices. The strategies, boundaries and accounting methods of the programme, together with the organization and conception of research among …
Home on the Range
This article introduces the special issue on middle-range theory in science and technology studies (STS), providing the background to its production and reviewing different notions of "middle." It begins with Merton's ideas about middle-range theory as a way of moving beyond the production of either descriptions or theories of everything. Instead of seeing the middle as the space between the theoretical imagination and the detailed depiction of e…
A Secret Formula, a Rogue Patent and Public Knowledge about Nerve Gas
What makes knowledge dangerous? How does secrecy operate to help produce knowledge that is dangerous or otherwise? What happens when ‘nothing happens’? This paper addresses these questions through a case study in the history of chemical weapons research in the UK. It focuses on the publication and subsequent treatment in 1975 of a newspaper article reporting that the patent on the chemical warfare agent, VX, was available in a number of public li…
Killing `Without the Distressing Preliminaries
The Effect of Transport Accessibility on the Social Inclusion of Wheelchair Users
In recent years the accessibility of London buses has improved with the introduction of ramps and wheelchair priority areas. These advances are meant to remove physical barriers to entering the bus, but new conflicts have arisen particularly over the physical space aboard. We aimed to research the barriers faced by wheelchair users in public transport using a mixed methods approach to establish the breadth of issues faced by wheelchair users. To …
Secrecy and Science
It is no secret that twentieth-century Britain was governed through a culture of secrecy, and secrecy was particularly endemic in military research and defence policy surrounding biological and chemical warfare. More generally, it is hard to exaggerate the role of secrecy in all past biological and chemical warfare programmes and several recent historical surveys of biological and chemical warfare research have emphasised that all state sponsored…
The Anatomy of the Brain Drain Debate, 1950–1970s
This witness seminar on the brain drain debate 1950-70s was held on 23 May 2006 in the JZ Young Lecture Theatre, University College London. It was organised by the Department of Science & Technology Studies, UCL, as part of a research project on the Brain Drain debate funded by the ESRC. The witnesses included Prof Ron Bullough (formerly Atomic Energy Research Establishment Harwell and interviewer for British recruitment boards in North America);…
How does an accident become an experiment? Secret science and the exposure of the public to biological warfare agents
During the Cold War, British scientists carried out a clandestine programme of research aimed at developing an anti‐personnel biological weapon comparable in effect and strategic importance with th
The drift of biological weapons policy in the UK 1945–1965
Gene Mapping and Policy-Making
This paper examines various unsuccessful attempts by Australian geneticists to become involved in the international Human Genome Project. Several attempts were made by various scientists to gain support for organized gene mapping through the National Health and Medical Research Council, the Department of Industry, Technology and Commerce and the Cooperative Research Centres funding scheme. Different expectations of the role of science in each cas…
Managing Mapping in the Human Genome Project
It is usual in science studies to focus attention on either science policy or laboratory practices. This paper examines the mutual shaping of science and policy through the case of the Human Genome Mapping Project in the UK. It is argued that the evolution of policy was not merely a series of administrative choices. The strategies, boundaries and accounting methods of the programme, together with the organization and conception of research among …
The drift of biological weapons policy in the UK 1945–1965
Improving Nature? The Science and Ethics of Genetic Engineering, by Michael J. Reiss and Roger Straughan; Birth to Death
Biological warfare
The story of work on biological warfare in the twentieth century is briefly reviewed and the history of the British programme analyzed, largely from documents now available in the Public Records Office. The position of the United Kingdom in relation to other military and political issues has varied, as has its overall attitude from time to time. In the 1930s a defensive stance was linked to the health effects of conventional war. During and after…
Killing `Without the Distressing Preliminaries
How does an accident become an experiment? Secret science and the exposure of the public to biological warfare agents
During the Cold War, British scientists carried out a clandestine programme of research aimed at developing an anti‐personnel biological weapon comparable in effect and strategic importance with th
A Secret Formula, a Rogue Patent and Public Knowledge about Nerve Gas
What makes knowledge dangerous? How does secrecy operate to help produce knowledge that is dangerous or otherwise? What happens when ‘nothing happens’? This paper addresses these questions through a case study in the history of chemical weapons research in the UK. It focuses on the publication and subsequent treatment in 1975 of a newspaper article reporting that the patent on the chemical warfare agent, VX, was available in a number of public li…
Volunteer human subjects' understandings of their participation in a biomedical research experiment
Home on the Range
This article introduces the special issue on middle-range theory in science and technology studies (STS), providing the background to its production and reviewing different notions of "middle." It begins with Merton's ideas about middle-range theory as a way of moving beyond the production of either descriptions or theories of everything. Instead of seeing the middle as the space between the theoretical imagination and the detailed depiction of e…
The Anatomy of the Brain Drain Debate, 1950–1970s
This witness seminar on the brain drain debate 1950-70s was held on 23 May 2006 in the JZ Young Lecture Theatre, University College London. It was organised by the Department of Science & Technology Studies, UCL, as part of a research project on the Brain Drain debate funded by the ESRC. The witnesses included Prof Ron Bullough (formerly Atomic Energy Research Establishment Harwell and interviewer for British recruitment boards in North America);…
Constructing a safe research environment
This paper analyses how talk between researchers and their volunteer human subjects works to construct a safe and supportive environment in a laboratory setting where women volunteers participate in the development of a new imaging technology with potential for diagnosing breast cancer. Drawing on discourse analysis perspectives, we explore the work talk has to do in order to facilitate the instrumental, ethical and social dimensions of the inter…
The Royal Society and the ‘brain drain’
Although concerns about the loss of British scientists to the USA and elsewhere grew slowly throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, the Royal Society's 1963 report on the emigration of scientists sparked a very public debate about the ‘brain drain’. This paper concentrates on the Society's key role in creating focus and impetus for the debate through the report and questionnaire survey that informed it. In this engagement with social science resear…
Keeping Nothing Secret
After renouncing an offensive chemical warfare programme in 1956, the UK Cabinet Defence Committee decided in 1963 to re-acquire a chemical warfare retaliatory capability. This article describes how the re-acquisition decision was engendered by a combination of novel research findings, changes in strategic thinking, new intelligence and pressures from NATO. Despite the 1963 decision, no new chemical weapons capability was acquired by the UK and i…
Life as Surplus
Melinda Cooper, Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era, Seattle, University of Washington Press, 2008, 208 pp., $25.00 (paperback), ISBN 9780295987910 A landmark step i
Ignorance is strength?
This chapter discusses the challenge of knowing about what is purposefully rendered difficult to know about matters of defense, intelligence and security. In the light of this challenge, the chapter seeks to develop an appreciation of how commentators across varied disciplines characterize the relation between knowledge and ignorance in matters associated with intelligence, security and national secrecy. It explores how ignorance can become a res…
Absence in Science, Security and Policy
This book explores the absent and missing in debates about science and security. Through varied case studies, including biological and chemical weapons control, science journalism, nanotechnology rese
Preventing ‘A Virological Hiroshima’
This article examines representations of biological weapons during a crucial period in the recent history of this form of warfare. The study draws on a corpus of newspaper articles from the US New York Times and the UK Times and Guardian written around the time of the negotiation period of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, the international treaty banning this form of warfare. We argue that a conventional discourse can be found wherein biol…
The Effect of Transport Accessibility on the Social Inclusion of Wheelchair Users
In recent years the accessibility of London buses has improved with the introduction of ramps and wheelchair priority areas. These advances are meant to remove physical barriers to entering the bus, but new conflicts have arisen particularly over the physical space aboard. We aimed to research the barriers faced by wheelchair users in public transport using a mixed methods approach to establish the breadth of issues faced by wheelchair users. To …
Secrecy and Science
It is no secret that twentieth-century Britain was governed through a culture of secrecy, and secrecy was particularly endemic in military research and defence policy surrounding biological and chemical warfare. More generally, it is hard to exaggerate the role of secrecy in all past biological and chemical warfare programmes and several recent historical surveys of biological and chemical warfare research have emphasised that all state sponsored…
Shadow Values and the Politics of Extrapolation
Intelligence, Ignorance, and Diplomacy in the Cold War
Drawing on perspectives from “ignorance studies,” this article examines a case of multiple types of expertise and ignorance within the geo-political context of the Cold War. It revisits a suspected breach of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). In 1979, an outbreak of anthrax occurred in the Russian city of Sverdlovsk, killing numerous people; Sverdlovsk was also the site of a military facility suspected by the West of undertaking biolog…
Political science (17 obras) · Law (14 obras) · Law (9 obras) · Computer Science (8 obras) · Politics (8 obras) · Sociology (8 obras) · Biological warfare (7 obras) · Epistemology (6 obras) · Psychology (6 obras) · Bacillus and Francisella bacterial research (5 obras)