Storying corporate futures: The Shell Scenarios An Interview with Betty Sue Flowers This chapter appeared in Corporate Futures, Volume V of the Late Editions Series, George Marcus ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Introduction This chapter contains two interviews that I conducted with Betty Sue Flowers about her writing and editing of Shell International’s 1992 and 1995 futures-planning scenarios. I first met Betty Sue at a men’s conference (a la Robert Bly and the mythopoetic men’s movement) in Austin, Texas, where she and I were two of only four women speakers, and the only two present the night we met. It took me a while to spot her in a huge ballroom filled with 800 men and two women–she […]

Bucky balls, fullerenes, and the future: An Oral History Interview with Professor Richard E. Smalley January 22, 2000 Nanotechnology is the art and science of building materials and devices at the ultimate level of finesse: atom by atom. Like a tiny poem with every word and space wisely placed, a thing built by nanotechnology has every atom in its place, and never two where one will do. . . .Today we begin a collaboration with NASA to develop a new kind of nanotechnology, one that starts with a perfect carbon structure that biology cannot make: fullerene nano-tubes and fibers. The promise of this new technology is vast: cables 100 times stronger than steel at only one-sixth the weight and with […]

On biomedicine Atwood D. Gaines and Robbie Davis-Floyd This entry appears in the Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology, eds. Carol and Melvin Ember. Yale: Human Relations Area Files, 2003. The designation “Biomedicine” as the name of the professional medicine of the West emphasizes the fact that this is a preeminently biological medicine. As such, it can be distinguished from the professional medicines of other cultures and, like them, its designation can be considered a proper noun and capitalized. The label Biomedicine was for these reasons conferred by Gaines and Hahn (1985) on what had variously been labeled “scientific medicine,” “cosmopolitan medicine,” “Western medicine,” “allopathic medicine” and simply, “medicine” (Engel 1980; Kleinman 1980; Leslie 1976; Mishler 1981). “Medicine” as a label was […]