Dr Bronwyn Parry, BA Hons (Macquarie) PhD (Cantab)
Reader in Geography
School of Geography
Queen Mary, University of London
Mile End Road, London E1 4NS
Phone: 020 7882 5439
Fax: 020 7882 7479
Email: b.parry@qmul.ac.uk
Bronwyn Parry is an economic and cultural geographer whose primary interests lie in investigating the way human-environment relations are being re-cast by technological, economic and regulatory changes. Her special interests include the rise and operation of the life sciences industry, informationalism, the commodification of life forms, posthumanism, bioethics and systems for knowing, disciplining and governing nature.
Trading the Genome: Investigating the Commodification of Bio-information
Over the past decade Bronwyn has conducted a number of detailed research projects that have explored the progressive commodification of non-human and human biological materials including organs and tissues. This research, which began with her study of the fate of collections of biological materials gathered under a series of bio-prospecting programmes for use in the American pharmaceutical industry, illustrates how such materials - and the engineered artefacts that are derived from them - cell lines, tissues samples and sequenced DNA are now being traded internationally as part of a new global resource economy in ‘bio-information’. The findings of this project were published as a single authored monograph entitled “Trading the Genome: Investigating the Commodification of Bio-information” by Columbia University Press in 2004. (Click here for details). In 2002 she received a major grant from The Wellcome Trust to undertake a further three-year study into the economic, social and ethical issues surrounding the creation and use of human tissue banks in the UK. This project investigates how human body parts and derivatives are understood and used as occasional commodities within the contemporary life sciences industry. Her findings from this research have been published in a variety of interdisciplinary journals.
Examining historical and contemporary contestations over ‘ownership’ of bodily materials and artefacts has led her to investigate the role that different knowledge systems (from the Linnaean system of biological classification to the WTO TRIPS system of Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights) have played in regulating access to, and use of biological and ‘natural’ materials over time. She has also undertaken comparative work on the role of international regulatory regimes and indigenous knowledge systems in resource management and use and in this capacity has undertaken consultative work for the UN and the UK government. Her interest and expertise in reviewing the ethical implications of new technological developments in biology and the life sciences has resulted in her recent election to the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. Here she has contributed to projects exploring the ethical implications of the forensic use of bio-information and the recent crisis in public health in the UK.
Bronwyn is currently developing several new strands of research. The first explores the role that corporeality plays in shaping our everyday engagements with the world. This work combines her long standing interests in the body with more recent engagements with phenomenology, materialist and affective geographies. The second analyses the phenomena of ‘reproductive tourism’ and assesses how it is altering concepts of kinship, nationality and biological relatedness, the third (for which she has recently received a project grant of £30,000) considers how the visual arts may be rehabilitated as a medium for communicating complex ethical issues in science to a wider public. She welcomes prospective PhD students interested in any of these areas.
See also Bronwyn’s entry in the Geographies of Biomedical Science section of the Health Place and Society Research Theme web pages
Publications:
Some recent publications include:
- Parry, B.C. (2008) “Entangled exchange: Reconceptualising the characterisation and practice of bodily commodification” Geoforum (forthcoming)
- Parry, B.C. (2008) “Geographical Indications: Not all ‘Champagne and Roses’” in Bently, L. Davis, J. and Ginsberg, J. (Eds.) Trademarks and Brands Cambridge University Press.
- Parry, B.C. (2007) Cornering the Futures Market in ‘Bio-epistemology’ Biosocieties Volume 2, issue 03, pp. 386-389.
- Parry, B.C. (2006) “The private life of genetic samples” Women’s Studies Quarterly Special Issue: The Global and the Intimate, Spring/Summer 2006 p.52-53
- Parry, B.C. and Gere, C. M. (2006) “Contested Bodies: Property Models and the Commodification of Human Biological Artefacts” Science as Culture Vol. 15. No. 2. pp. 139-158
- Gere, C.M. and Parry, B.C. (2006) “The Flesh Made Word: Banking the Body in the Age of Information”. Biosocieties, Vol. 1 No. 1. pp. 83-98
- Parry BC (2004) Trading the Genome: Investigating the commodification of bio-information Columbia University Press, New York, New York.