Lecture: The Future of Medicine

Between open source medical technologies and self-synthetized hormones

Medicine is changing at a rapid pace, but it’s facing regulatory compliance which act as a barrier to innovation and a necessary check to ensure quality medical care.

EchOpen is an open, collaborative and decentralized project and community which aims to make open and freely available medical imaging technologies. Their goal in a near future is to design a functional prototype of a low-cost and open source echo-stethoscope connected to a smartphone. Thought for health professionals from southern and northern countries, it’s allowing the radical transformation of diagnostic orientation in hospitals, general medicine and medically underserved areas. What does Open Source medical devices implies in the open source hardware movement in terms of accessibility, technologies, communities, norms and legal issues? Olivier De Fresnoye, coordinator of the project, will give us insights on what kind of impacts could have a device like Echopen in medical care.

DIY and open source practices can serve as a citizen alternative to corporatized and institutional control by confronting issues of body sovereignty. In response to the various biopolitics of hormonal control on female and trans-woman bodies prescribed by governments and corporations, the open source estrogen project aims to develop a system that promotes non-institutional estrogen production for uses in birth control and hormone-replacement therapy. What is the feasibility of citizen science-based approach to synthesizing hormones? How can the recontextualization of laboratory chemistry to an open source recipe outline the esoteric procedures and knowledge that are required to carry out such a process? What are the ethics behind self-administering self-synthesized hormones? Byron Rich, in collaboration with Mary Tsang, will share their goal with us: a workflow for DIY estrogen synthesis.

Info

Day: 2015-11-07
Start time: 12:00
Duration: 00:45
Room: C361
Track: Biohacking

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