Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
4
Life Sciences: Discontents and Consolations
Paul Rabinow
There is little doubt that the March 24, 2000, issue of
Science
titled “The
Drosophila Genome” marks a threshold in scientific achievement. This
threshold, it is true, is only one in a much longer series of such achieve-
ments, many of them of recent vintage. In turn, these impressive techno-
scientific achievements pose a host of other questions ranging from the
metaphysical to the political.
Today, there is widespread consensus that one of the central, if not the
central, developments and consequently concerns in the Western world
is that scientists are now capable of purposively changing the nature of
living beings. They have achieved this power through what was origi-
nally called genetic engineering, although today it is more commonly
referred to as genetic manipulation. The fear exists that molecular biol-
ogists and others in the cutting-edge life sciences as well as those who
finance them (states, corporations, philanthropies) have entered into the
ambit of self-production. This state of affairs has been characterized with
the attendant gravitas by an apparently endless procession of
prophètes
de malheur
as alternatively Faustian, Promethean, Frankensteinian, or
most amusingly of all among this hodgepodge of metaphoric excess and
confusion, godlike.
1
But the diagnosis of a crossing of a threshold with the introduction of
the techniques of genetic manipulation, while no doubt perceptive and
pertinent, must be complemented by further considerations. These con-
siderations turn on the following claims, which I can only assert here
(but for which I have attempted to provide detailed demonstrations else-
where). An individual's self-production is a diacritic of modernity as both
epoch and ethos.
2
Following from Michel Foucault's definition of “man”
in his 1966
Les Mots et Les Choses
on the intersection of labor,
