Genspace – empowering the community with DNA

Engineers Australia and CORE are delighted to be hosting Ellen Jorgensen to tell us about Genspace, the world’s first community lab as part of National Science Week.

Genspace is a platform for science innovation at the grassroots level, and was named one of the World's Top 10 Innovative Companies in Education by Fast Company magazine.
Ellen is at the forefront of open biotechnology platforms and her efforts to develop Genspace into a haven for entrepreneurship, innovation and citizen science have been chronicled by Nature Medicine, Science, Discover Magazine, Wired, Make, BBC News, Dan Rather Reports, PBS News Hour, The Discovery Channel, and The New York Times. Ellen holds a Ph.D. in molecular biology and spent 30 years in the biotech industry before founding Genspace.

Find Ellen at the Perth Science Festival, and other events around Perth: www.scienceweek.net.au/WA

In addition, second speaker Oron Catts, Director of SymbioticA, will present on Life as an Instrument of Art.
As biology becoming an engineering discipline and life is becoming a raw material, the idea of life is going through some radical transformations; artists have been experimenting with ways of articulating these shifts. This talk would cover some of the strategies and projects that researchers at SymbioticA have employed to deal with life as both raw material and an ever contestable subject of manipulation. Looking at all levels of life – from the molecular to the ecological this talk would attempt to present the need to develop a new cultural language where words seems to be no longer appropriate.

Oron Catts is the Director of SymbioticA, The Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts, School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology, The University of Western Australia and a Professor of Contestable Design at The Royal College of Arts, London. Oron is an artist, designer, researcher and curator whose pioneering work with the Tissue Culture and Art Project which he established in 1996 is considered a leading biological art project. In 2000 he co-founded SymbioticA, an artistic research centre housed within the School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology, The University of Western Australia. Under his leadership SymbioticA has gone on to win the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica in Hybrid Art (2007) the WA Premier Science Award (2008) and became a Centre for Excellence in 2008.
In 2009 he was recognised by Thames & Hudson’s “60 Innovators Shaping our Creative Future” book in the category “Beyond Design”, and by Icon Magazine (UK) as one of the top 20 Designers, “making the future and transforming the way we work”. Oron's ideas and projects reach beyond the confines of art; his work is often cited as inspiration to diverse areas such as new materials, textiles, design, architecture, ethics, fiction, and food.