• Ph.D., History of Science, Harvard University
• B.A., Hampshire College

A historian of the life sciences, Mike Fortun’s current research focuses on the contemporary science, culture, and political economy of genomics. His work in the life sciences has covered the policy, scientific, and social history of the Human Genome Project in the U.S., the history of biotechnology, and the growth of commercial genomics and bioinformatics in the speculative economies of the 1990s.

His most recent work is Promising Genomics: Iceland and deCODE Genetics in a World of Speculation an ethnographic account of deCODE Genetics in Iceland.  His other recent ethnographic work on toxicogenomics, and on the use of race variables in genetics research on complex conditions (nicotine use and asthma), is based in ongoing involvement with trans-disciplinary groups of geneticists, physicians, historians, legal and policy scholars, and anthropologists centered at the Insitutute for Health Care Research at Georgetown University and the Institute for Health Policy at Harvard University.

He is co-editor (with Kim Fortun) of Cultural Anthropology, the journal of the Society for Cultural Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association.