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Scientists are supposed to have freedom to choose and conduct their experiments and exchange their ideas. Known as scientific freedom, this idea has been implicated in both wonderful and terrible scientific discoveries. Although it is not new, it has great relevance to contemporary society. In a time of genetic editing, global warming, and a worldwide pandemic, the question of how freely science is and should be conducted is one that has significant practical consequences.
Join us for an evening on a subject of utmost importance to not just the freedom but also the development of ideas. Helle Porsdam and Sebastian Porsdam Mann will be sharing and discussing the ideas they have put forward in their new book, Scientific Freedom: The Heart of the Right to Science.
Drawing on rigorous interdisciplinary methods, this book defines the concept of scientific freedom, tells its story, and asks on what basis scientific freedom is best justified. Based on international human rights law and philosophy, the authors develop a model of scientific freedom as a constitutive element of the human right to enjoy the benefits of the progress of science and its applications. To illustrate its usefulness, they then test and apply this model to a real-life and real-time case study, as well as to two highly important international human rights instruments.
About the Authors
Helle Porsdam is Professor of Law and Humanities at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies of Law (CIS), Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen. She teaches American culture and history in the SAXO Department, Faculty of the Humanities, University of Copenhagen, and law and humanities, the culture and history of human rights and cultural rights at the Faculty of Law. She also holds a UNESCO Chair in Cultural Rights. She did her PhD in American Studies at Yale University, has been a Liberal Arts Fellow twice at the Harvard Law School as well as a fellow at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, and the University of Munich.
Sebastian Porsdam Mann is a bioethicist and legal scholar. Following military service, he was educated in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, where he also obtained his first PhD in neuroethics. Sebastian has held postdoctoral positions in bioethics at Harvard Medical School and, as Carlsberg Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, at the Universities of Copenhagen and Oxford. He is currently finishing up a second doctorate at the Faculty of Law, Oxford. His research interests span cognitive enhancement, data and blockchain ethics, the human right to science, and ethical and legal implications of large language models. He is co-author/editor, most recently, of the books The Right to Science: Then and Now (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and Scientific Freedom: The Heart of the Right to Science (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023). Outside of academia, Sebastian is an avid athlete and has competed in volleyball and Taekwondo.