Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
language, and life, we can establish a historical series in the process of
self-production. Labor was the first modern domain where what were
proclaimed to be an unsettling, unprecedented, and epochal set of
changes were taking place. The thesis that “man makes himself” through
his labor was argued for philosophically by the young G. W. F. Hegel
and then given world historical importance in the writings of Karl Marx.
The modernization of labor—with its positive and negative effects on
anthropos
—was followed by that of language. The theme of a human
being's self-formation through discourse is developed most clearly in the
structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, and Roland
Barthes, but also Roman Jakabson and many others. Hannah Arendt's
claims that it is only through public discourse that humans become fully
human continues the tradition.
3
So, just as “society” and “discourse”
have been modernized through science and planning, now it is the turn
of life.
4
Drosophila Lessons: Function Not Substance
The humble fruit fly has been the twentieth century's organism of choice
for studying genetics, the basis of life. Its centrality has endured from its
early fame at Columbia University, where it was chosen as a model
organism in part because its reproductive habits fit the academic calen-
dar, up to the present, when a hybrid consortium of public university
labs (especially Berkeley) and the controversial biotechnology company
Celera Genomics chose Drosophila as a demonstration project for their
genome mapping strategies. Celera did so in part to prove to its com-
petitors (especially the U.S. government-funded university/philanthropy
consortium mapping the human genome) the power of its approach. The
Drosophila map was also presented as a gift to science (free CD-ROMs
are available), a token of this early twenty-first-century triumph of utter
technological bravura.
It may be only a slight exaggeration to say that more has been learned
in the last four years about Drosophila genetics than had been painstak-
ingly accumulated in the previous seventy-five. Eventually, as Max Weber
pointed out, what is known today will also seem “historical.” The his-
toricizing process has already begun with the juxtaposition by the press
of photographs of mustachioed and suited Drosophila scientists posed
