Margaret Lock

Margaret Lock FRSC (born 1936) is a distinguished British-Canadian medical anthropologist, known for her publications in connection with an anthropology of the body and embodiment, comparative epistemologies of medical knowledge and practice, and the global impact of emerging biomedical technologies.

[citation needed] She carried out laboratory research at the Banting Institute, Toronto, and then at the University of California, at both the San Francisco and Berkeley campuses.

She has been a research associate and a visiting professor at Kyoto University, and has taught at St. Luke's International Hospital, Tokyo.

Her first book, East Asian Medicine in Urban Japan: Varieties of Medical Experience (1980), set the stage for over two decades of critically reflective comparative ethnographic research in Japan and North America in connection with disease and illness, life cycle transitions, and the body.

Lock created the concept of "local biologies" to account for the empirical findings generated by this research.

[13] She is working currently on the burgeoning discipline of epigenetics, which confronts the age-old debate of nature versus nurture.

[19] In 2014 lock was a finalist for the Mavis Gallant Prize for non-fiction from the Quebec Writers Association for The Alzheimer Conumdrum: Entanglements of Dementia and Aging.

Review: Lock M. (2002) Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death, Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press.