Beatrix Rubin has been a senior scientist at the Collegium Helveticum since 2007 and project director of the research project “Tracking the Human: Technologies of Collecting, Ordering and Comparing or The Problem of Relevant Knowledge” since October 2009. She is also a member of the Science Studies Program at the University of Basel.
Beatrix has studied Biology at the University of Konstanz, the University of Oregon in Eugene, the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole and the Technical University in Munich. In 1995 she completed her PhD on the regeneration of the Central Nervous System at the University of Zurich. From 1996 to 2001 she worked as a post doc on the development of the nervous system at the Friedrich Miescher-Institute in Basel.
In 2001 she moved on to the field of applied ethics and became a member of the Institute for Medical Ethics at the University of Basel. There she investigated the therapeutic prospects and ethical implications of stem cell research and genetic diagnosis. As a consequence of this work, she developed a project on the initiation, reception, and implementation of human embryonic stem cell research. In 2004 this project took her to her current field of interest, sociology of science and scientific knowledge. She completed an analysis on the ways in which the quest for novel therapies has made the human embryo accessible first as an object of experimental manipulation, then of public debate, and finally as the subject of legal regulation.
Since November 2007 Beatrix is working on her current project “plastic brains in a plastic society”. She investigates the factors, which have provoked and shaped a profound change in the understanding of the plasticity of the nervous system.