13 - Vaccine Development and Biohacking

Tue, Feb 28

Guest Speaker: Patrick Gamez

Today we will have a guest lecturer Dr. Pat Gamez join us to consider how traditional engineering and programming approaches are being applied to medicine, particularly through the development and roll-out of vaccines. This class will build on our previous in-class conversations regarding open source data, and genomic datasets. 

The learning goals for today's lecture are: 

  • Understand the how computation is invading the space of vaccine development
  • Apply ethics of programming to biotechnical spaces such as vaccine development. 
  • Understand how online spaces such as social media are influencing public health interventions such as vaccine rollouts.

The slides for today's lecture can be found here

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Consider the following questions for class: 

  • How might timing play a role in the ethics of vaccine development and delivery? Is it ever ethical to shortcut that process and use biohacking approaches?
  • How might social media be changing the public health landscape? Are there benefits and drawbacks to this high velocity spread of information?
  • How are computational approaches changing medical developments?

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