Molecular Biology Over Time: Doing Biochemistry Without a Licence

This series, co-hosted with UBC Emeritus College, brings together scholars who inhabit the same academic discipline or field of study, and are at different stages of their careers, to talk about how the boundaries separating their field of specialization from other fields have shifted over time. This fifth event in the series will stage a conversation between scholars of Molecular Biology. The moderator will ask the panelists a series of questions about their perspectives on the discipline, and the discussion will be opened at an early stage to members of the audience. The goal of the event is to grasp the interdisciplinary nexus that is ‘Molecular Biology’ in Canadian and other universities and to peer into possible futures of the field.

This series will bring together scholars who inhabit the same academic discipline or field of study, and are at different stages of their careers, to talk about how the boundaries separating their field of specialization from other fields have changed over time. The conversation will inevitably lead to a consideration of cross-disciplinary influences and interdisciplinary trends, as participants account for changes in the cognitive strength of sub-disciplines and the rise and fall of disciplinary paradigms. The intent will be to identify underlying reasons for the observed changes and, by the end of the series, to draw some general conclusions about mechanisms of (inter)disciplinary interaction and development, in the spirit—if not necessarily the style—of Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault.