UCL Department of Science and Technology Studies

Cain, Joe

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HPSC3004 Dissertation - past projects

This page lists undergraduate dissertation projects previously supervised by Dr Cain.

Class of 2011-12 Supervisions

• philosophy of extinction
• medicine in the Lewis and Clark expedition
• Neanderthal hybridization
• species-ism by humans

Class of 2010-11 Supervisions

• history and future of aquaria
• UCL's 'Peking Man' material: its origins and significance
• public policy related to human population growth

Class of 2009-10 Supervisions

• object biography: dodo at Grant Museum of Zoology
• object biography: embryological models at Grant Museum of Zoology
• history of object handling at Horniman Museum
• research of Paul Ekman

Class of 2008-9 Supervisions

• history of mimicry
• history of competitive exclusion in ecology
• science policy in seed banking
• science policy in water management
• recent developments in science education regarding evolution/inteligent design

Class of 2007-8 Supervisions

• HJ Muller's winning of the Nobel Prize
• history of Arctic exploration
• concepts of Schizophrenia
• Marie Stopes' Married Love

Class of 2006-7 Supervisions

• sickle-cell
• memetics
• post-WW2 eugenics

Class of 2005-6 Supervisions

• Marie Stopes and the rhetoric of her writing
• Louis Leakey's paleoanthropology
• 'missing links' in 19thC public understanding of science

Class of 2004-5 Supervisions

• epistemology and history of fingerprinting
• Natural History Museum's "Wildlife photographer of the year" exhibition
• critical analysis of Paul Ekman's research programme
• scientific utopias
• informed consent in medical research

Class of 2003-4 Supervisions

• research ethics in UK universities
• history of contraceptives
• wireless communications in WW2
• key concepts in philosophy of biology

Class of 2002-3 Supervisions

• [none - Dr Cain was on sabbatical]

Class of 2001-2 Supervisions

• underlying principles of codes for research ethics, 1950s-1970s
• Julian Huxley at the London Zoo
• natural selection implications of modern human activities
• medicine and disease in the colonial context

Class of 2000-1 Supervisions

• altruism and mechanisms in evolutionary biology
• biological laws, plurality, and unity of science
• science in the performing arts
• biologists' attitudes toward Christianity

Class of 1999-2000 Supervisions

• analysis of memetics
• germ-line gene therapy
• physical anthropology and ethnography in Venezuela
• xenotransplatation (via human sciences)
• economic botany -- bananas

Class of 1998-9 Supervisions

• concepts of life stretched by 'a-life' research
• nature-nuture debate
• Rupert Sheldrake as an outsider in science
• germ-line gene therapy

Class of 1998 Supervisions

• origins of Mendel's thinking
• dialetics of Marxism in Stephen Jay Gould's work
• nature of the "natural" in extinction studies
• philosophy of uniformitarianism

Class of 1996-7 Supervisions

• xenotransplantation and the non-problem of organ supply
• Francis Galton as a 'father' of eugenics

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Professor Joe Cain
UCL Department of Science and Technology Studies