Naked Genes: Reinventing the Human in the Molecular Age

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The molecular life sciences are making visible what was once invisible. Yet the more we learn about our own biology, the less we are able to fit this knowledge into an integrated whole. Life is divided into new sub-units and reassembled into new forms: from genes to clones, from embryonic stages to the building-blocks of synthetic biology. Extracted from their scientific and social contexts, these new entities become not only visible but indeed "naked": ready to assume an essential status of their own and take on multiple values and meanings as they pass from labs to courts, from patentoffices to parliaments and back. In Naked Genes, leading science scholar Helga Nowotny and molecular biologist Giuseppe Testa examine the interaction between these dramatic advances in the life sciences and equally dramatic political reconfigurations of our societies. They bring wit and freshness of perspective to ongoing debates over topics ranging from assisted reproduction and personalized medicine to genetic sports doping, revealing both surprising continuities and radical discontinuities between the latest advances in the life sciences and long-standing human traditions. The task of institutions in the molecular age, they argue, is to make a pluralistic society possible by carving a legitimate free space that allows experimentation with new forms of biological life as well as with new forms of social life.

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Helga Nowotny, one of the leading European voices in Science Studies, is President of the European Research Council and Chair, Scientific Advisory Board, University of Vienna.Giuseppe Testa heads the Laboratory of Stem Cell Epigenetics at the European Institute forOncology (IEO) in Milan and is the cofounder of the interdisciplinary PhD program FOLSATEC (Foundations of the Life Sciences and Their Ethical Consequences) in Milan.