Phillip Thurtle is an assistant professor of the Comparative History of Ideas program. He recently returned to the University of Washington from Carleton University where he was an assistant professor of sociology and anthropology. He received his PhD in history and the philosophy of science and technology from Stanford University. He has co-edited with Robert Mitchell (English, Duke University) the volumes Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information (Routledge, 2003) and Semiotic Flesh: Information and the Human Body (University of Washington Press, 2002). His research focuses on identity and biology in the American eugenics movement, the use of new media in the representation of popular science, the material culture of information processing, comics and the affective- phenomenological domains of media, and the role of information processing technologies in biomedical research. His work has appeared in the Stanford Humanities Review, the Journal of Immunology, and the Journal of the History of Biology as well as as well as the Oxford University Press Handbook of Science and the edited collection Shifting Ground: Transformed Views of the American Landscape. He formerly worked with tissue culture, genetic manipulation, and functional biomolecular characterization as a molecular immunologist.