The Biosport Project is a collaboration between the UK universities of Sussex, Royal Holloway London and Swansea. The four team members combine academic interest in the sociology of medicine, healthcare and biomedical science & technology, and the philosophy and ethics of sport and sports medicine; we all have a personal interest in sports practices, pressures and injuries.
Alex Faulkner is a sociologist who has studied and written about medical technologies and healthcare innovation for over 20 years. He is especially interested in how medical devices and new technologies such as tissue engineering and cell therapy evolve, how they are regulated and how they get into everyday medical use. Amongst many other things he has written and given talks about artificial hips, testing for prostate cancer, monitoring of warfarin therapy, and genomics in India. He recently served a period on NICE’s national Medical Technologies Advisory Committee, which advises on adoption of new technologies into the UK’s NHS. He’s been a regular tennis player for over 40 years, heightening his concern about novel treatments for sports injuries such as ligaments and tendons, and the long-term welfare of athletes. His best shot is the backhand volley.
Mike McNamee is a Professor of Applied Ethics in the College of Engineering, Swansea University. He is former President of the International Association for the Philosophy of Sport (2001), Founding Chair of the British Philosophy of Sport Association (2002) and has served on the Executive Committee of many national and international academic associations. He is Founding Editor of Sport, Ethics and Philosophy (2007), and is Co-Editor of Routledge’s book series “Ethics and Sports”. He has worked with and for many national and international associations in relation to ethical issues, including the European Union, UK Sport, UK Anti Doping, the Football Association, the International Cycling Union, and the World Anti Doping Agency. Mike used to play University level football, bringing him into too close contact with cartilage repairs, and has more recently taken a very keen personal interest in tennis elbow treatments.
Jonathan Gabe is Professor of Sociology at Royal Holloway university of London. He has researched medical technology, particularly pharmaceuticals, for over thirty years. Recently he has become interested in the links between medical technology and elite sport and the extent to which the latter is being medicalised. He has been an editor of the international journal Sociology of Health and Illness twice since the mid 1990s and is currently President of the International Sociological Association Research Network on Sociology of Health. He is an avid sports fan who supports Arsenal football team and has a debenture seat at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium.
Catherine Coveney is a Research Fellow in Global Health at the University of Sussex. Her research has looked at the different ways in which people understand and use medical and health technologies in daily life. She is interested in how new biomedical technologies can be used to improve, optimise and enhance health or performance both on and off the sports field, and the social and ethical issues that this raises. She has written about social and ethical aspects of existing and emerging biomedical technologies in social science journals and books. She witnessed first-hand how much impact sports injuries – and rehabilitation and recovery - can have on daily life when her husband recently underwent knee surgery for a ruptured anterior cruciate ligament. This has stimulated her interest in how these biomedical tools and techniques might be used in sports injuries.
Read more about the project.