Dr Reuben Message
Research Fellow in Responsible Research and Innovation
- Science, Technology and Innovation Studies
- School of Social and Political Science
- College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
Contact details
- Email: rmessage@ed.ac.uk
Address
- Street
-
Chisholm House
1 Surgeons Square
High School Yards - City
- Edinburgh
- Post code
- EH1 1LZ
Background
Prior to coming to STIS, I was based at the University of Oxford’s School of Geography and the Environment where I worked on a Wellcome Trust funded collaborative project investigating the cultures of care and communication in UK animal research. Here I focused, amongst other things, on how human-animal relations influences the way ethics is put into practice within in the context of relatively stabilised regulatory norms and practices - as well as the challenges that some laboratory organisms, specifically zebrafish, can represent to this system given their species-specific characteristics and social histories.
Originally from South Africa, I completed a PhD in Sociology at the London School of Economics, my thesis examining early aquaculture (or "fish culture") technologies and discourses through the lens of the social studies of reproduction, arguing in the process that these techniques constituted an early kind of ‘artificial reproductive technology’ constitutively connected to the socio-economic and legal environment in which they emerged.
Project activity
I am currently working on the snappily titled 'Engineering Biology for Cell and Gene Therapy Applications' project with Jane Calvert and collaborators from the Centre for Mammalian Synthetic Biology, SynthSys and elsewhere across the University. This work is funded by an Engineering Biology Transition Award from UKRI/BBSRC.