About OutLawBio
OutLawBio has two objectives: to disseminate research relevant to biohacking, community biology, DIY biology, and other biomedical science activities, and to promote conversation and collaboration among stakeholders in these spaces.
Meet the Team
Christi Guerrini, JD, MPH
Christi Guerrini is an Asst. Professor in the Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy at Baylor College of Medicine, where she teaches and conducts research at the intersection of law, innovation, health, and ethics. She is the principal investigator of research on biomedical citizen science initiatives and a co-principal investigator of research on investigative genetic genealogy. Christi has published over 30 articles on these and related topics in traditional law reviews and scientific journals, including Science, Nature Biotechnology, and Genetics in Medicine. She is an appointed member of the Investigative Genetic Genealogy Working Group of the Scientific Working Group on DNA Analysis Methods (SWGDAM) and also a member of the Ethics Working Group of the Citizen Science Association. Prior to joining BCM, Christi was a practicing attorney.
Alex Pearlman, MA
Alex Pearlman is an award-winning journalist and a bioethicist. Her reporting and commentary on emerging issues in science and technology has appeared in Stat, New Scientist, MIT Technology Review, The Boston Globe, Neo.Life, Vice, and elsewhere. She was recently featured in the Showtime documentary “Citizen Bio.”
Alex is currently a digital ethnographer in the Wexler Lab at the UPenn Dept. of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, where she is researching ethics in community bio during the Covid19 pandemic. She is also a Research Affiliate with the Community Biotechnology Initiative at the MIT Media Lab, where she studies the intersection of the community biology movement with issues in ethics and policy, including human enhancement, self-experimentation, and biohacking patented drugs and devices. She was a consultant for this biomedical citizen science project and she also built this website. Subscribe to her newsletter!
Lisa M. Rasmussen, PhD
Dr. Rasmussen is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy, and a Faculty Fellow in the Graduate School at UNC Charlotte, with a focus on fostering a campus-wide culture of research integrity. She was recently appointed Editor-in-Chief of the journal Accountability in Research.
For the past 13 years, she has been an Editor for the Philosophy and Medicine book series, comprising nearly 140 volumes, and is currently Co-Chair of the Ethics Working Group of the Citizen Science Association. She sits on the Editorial Advisory Boards of The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy and Citizen Science: Theory and Practice, as well as several international grant advisory boards. She has served on the Executive Board of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, and on various hospital ethics committees for over two decades.
Joanna Kempner, PhD
Joanna Kempner is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University where she research, teach, and speak about the relationship between science, medicine, and justice, and the outlaw scientists who fight the political suppression of science. Kempner's research on the politics of pain gives voice to those who are too often silenced, asking: Whose pain matters? Why are there so few effective treatments for pain? What are the challenges of living a life in pain? And, more broadly, why are these important topics consistently ignored? Kempner is author of the award-winning book, Not Tonight: Migraine and the Politics of Gender and Health (Chicago 2014), in addition to research articles published in a wide-range of interdisciplinary journals, including Science, Social Science and Medicine, and Gender & Society. She is currently writing a book about the underground research networks responsible for bringing psychedelics back to medicine. You can read more about her research at www.joannakempner.com or follow her on Twitter @joannakempner.
Patricia J. Zettler, JD
Patricia J. Zettler is an Associate Professor of Law at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, a faculty member of the Drug Enforcement & Policy Center housed at the College of Law, and a Member of The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center. Professor Zettler’s teaching areas include Torts, Legislation and Regulation, Health Law, and Food and Drug Law.
Professor Zettler’s research focuses on the regulation of medicine, drugs and other medical products, and tobacco products, with an emphasis on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Zettler’s scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in leading legal, interdisciplinary, and medical journals, such as the Indiana Law Journal, Boston College Law Review, North Carolina Law Review, Journal of Law and the Biosciences, JAMA, JAMA Internal Medicine, EMBO Molecular Medicine, American Journal of Bioethics, and Public Health Reports. She also regularly writes about FDA-related issues at Objective Intent, the FDA law and policy blog that she co-founded, as well as at Stanford’s Law and the Biosciences Blog.
Anna Wexler, PhD
Anna Wexler received her Ph.D. in 2017 from the HASTS (History, Anthropology, Science, Technology & Society) Program at MIT, where she examined the ethical, legal, and social implications of emerging neurotechnology, with a particular focus on do-it-yourself and direct-to-consumer electrical brain stimulation. At Penn, she will extend her work to address the ethical and regulatory challenges raised by the full spectrum of interventions used in the home to modify brain function. She also plans to explore how do-it-yourself movements, direct-to-consumer health products, and citizen science initiatives are disrupting traditional models of medicine and science.
From 2015-2016, Anna was a visiting scholar at the Center for Neuroscience and Society at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to her return to academia, Anna spent several years working as documentary filmmaker and science writer; she co-directed and co-produced the feature documentary Unorthodox (2013). She received a dual BS from MIT in Brain and Cognitive Science, and in Humanities and Science with a focus in Writing and Neuroscience.