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The Biohumanities Project was a research project at the University of Queensland funded by the grant of an ARC Federation Fellowship to Prof. Paul Griffiths.
The project ran from September 2004 to July 2007.
Scholars in the humanities study biology and generate knowledge about biology. This is perhaps the most obvious in the history of science. Robert Olby's 1974 classic The Path to the Double Helix: The Discovery of DNA contains a great deal of information about biology, but it is a work of history, not a work of biology. Similarly, philosophers of science have explored the challenges posed by contemporary biology to traditional models of scientific method. Their work has created philosophical knowledge about biology. Philosophers of science also study the broad conceptual framework for thinking about the living world which has emerged from modern biological research, asking, for example, whether more traditional areas of biology have been or will be ?reduced' to molecular biology. Australian philosophers Kim Sterelny and Paul Griffiths' Sex and Death: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Biology (1999) outlines current views of this and other topics. Finally, the importance of biology to scholars of culture is nicely captured in the title of Dorothy Nelkin and Susan Lindee's The DNA Mystique: The Gene as a Cultural Icon. The importance of the gene as an actor on the cultural stage has only increased since they wrote in 1995.
Biohumanities studies 'biology' in two senses - the scientific discipline of biology and the objects it studies - biomolecules, animals, ecosystems and so forth. The history of biology encompasses not only scientific institutions, apparatus and laboratory practice, but also the objects of biological inquiry. The laboratory fruit fly or a cell-line preserved in laboratories around the world each have their own histories. Similarly, philosophers of biology conduct conceptual investigations of the nature of biological taxa (species, genera, families, etc) as well as studying the distinctive features of disciplines like biological taxonomy whose products are classifications rather than more stereotypical forms of scientific discovery.
Biohumanities research should be distinguished from 'ELSI' (Ethical,
Legal and Social Implications), a field which emerged from the decision
to devote 3-5% of the budget of the Human Genome Project to studying
such implications. Biohumanities researchers are primarily concerned to
produce good history, good philosophy of science and so forth, rather
than to make ethical or public policy recommendations.
