Challis lecture: The new sciences of sex and reproduction

A collaboration with ABC's Big Ideas. 

Society has traditionally categorised people as male and female, parent and child using simple biological criteria. The emergence of new social identities and new possibilities for medical intervention have both challenged this practice. Today we must explicitly debate and make choices about how these categories should be understood.

Philosophers Paul Griffiths and Luara Ferracioli are contributing to these debates through their research. Griffiths is examining how the relatively simple biology of reproduction gives rise to the complexities and indeterminacies of individual sex, and how new ways of changing human bodies add to that complexity. Ferracioli is examining how new reproductive technologies, including the realistic prospect of babies gestated entirely outside a human body, impact the legal and ethical assignment of parenthood.

The speakers

Luara Ferracioli is Associate Professor in Political Philosophy at the University of Sydney and ARC DECRA fellow. She was awarded her PhD from the Australian National University, and has held appointments at Oxford, Princeton, and the University of Amsterdam. Her first book Liberal Self-Determination in a World of Migration (Oxford University Press) was published in 2022 and her new book Parenting and the Goods of Childhood (Oxford University Press, 2023) is forthcoming.

Paul Griffiths is Challis Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney and a Domain Leader at the Charles Perkins Centre, one of the university’s main biomedical research institutes. Trained in philosophy of science, Paul specialises in assembling multi-disciplinary teams of philosophers and STEM researchers to address conceptual and theoretical questions in the life sciences.

He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Royal Society of NSW, and a recipient of the RSNSW Medal for History and Philosophy of Science. He has been awarded both a Laureate Fellowship (2018) and a Federation Fellowship (2007) by the Australian Research Council and numerous other research grants by the ARC, the US National Science Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. His books include What Emotions Really Are (1997), Sex and Death (1999, with Kim Sterelny) and Genetics and Philosophy (2013, with Karola Stotz).

Natasha Mitchell is a multi-award-winning journalist, radio presenter, podcaster, and audio storyteller specialising in science & society. She is host of the ABC Radio National’s flagship live events program and podcast Big Ideas, was founding host and producer of the internationally renowned radio show and one of the ABC’s first podcasts, All in the Mind, which won the Grand Prize and four Gold World Medals at the New York Radio Festivals, amongst other awards.

The Challis Professorships at the University of Sydney have been named in honour of merchant and philanthropist, John Henry Challis. After his death in 1880 his bequest to the University of Sydney allowed for the establishment of the University’s first professorships in the areas of Law, Medicine, Veterinary Science, Biology, Civil Engineering, English Literature, History and Philosophy, completely transforming the institution.