Dr. Margaret Lock

Biography

Margaret Lock is the Marjorie Bronfman Professor Emerita in Social Studies in Medicine, and is affiliated with the Department of Social Studies of Medicine and the Department of Anthropology at McGill University. She is an Officer of the Order of Canada, an Officier de L’Ordre national du Québec, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Lock was awarded the Prix Du Québec, domaine Sciences Humaines in 1997 and in the same year the Wellcome Medal of the Royal Anthropological Society of Great Britain. In 2002 she was awarded the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize and in 2005 the Canada Council for the Arts Killam Prize. She was also awarded a Trudeau Foundation Fellowship in 2005 and named a Grande Montréalaise, Secteur Social. Lock participated in the CBC radio program Ideas that ran between 2007 and 2008 entitled “How to Think About Science.” In 2008 she received the Career Achievement Award of the Society of Medical Anthropology, American Anthropological Association, and in 2011 she was appointed as an Honorary Member of the Golden Key International Honor Society, and received The McGill Medal for Exceptional Academic Achievement. In 2012 Lock was awarded a Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal and in 2015 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.    

Research Interest

Trained as a cultural anthropologist, Margaret Lock’s research focuses on a comparative anthropology of medicine and biomedical technologies. Lock initially researched the 20th century revival of the indigenous Japanese medical system that continues to proliferate to the present day. She has also carried out ethnographic inquiries into adolescence, female mid life, and old age in Japan. Her book Encounters with Aging: Mythologies of Menopause in Japan and North America, published in 1993 by the University of California Press, won six prizes including the Staley Prize of the School of American Research, the Canada-Japan Book Prize, and the Wellcome Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain. In 2002 the University of California Press published Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death, also an award-winning book. This volume documents professional and public disputes in Japan and North America about the recognition of brain death as the end of human life in order that organs can be legally procured for transplant. A book written together with Vinh-Kim Nguyen that examines the global impact of biomedical technologies, entitled An Anthropology of Medicine, was published in 2010 by Wiley-Blackwells. This book has been awarded the American Publishers Association's 2010 PROSE award for Archeology and Anthropology. Lock's recent book,  The Alzheimer Conundrum: Entanglements of Dementia and Aging was a finalist in the 2014 Mavis Gallant prize for non-fiction.  She is currently co-authoring a book for Polity Press titled Can Science Resolve the Nature/Nurture Debate?