Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
28. Ibid., 142.
29. Ibid., 143, 144.
30. Ibid., 143. See, by way of comparison: “Victorious capitalism, since it rests
on mechanical foundations, needs [religious asceticism's] support no longer. The
rosy blush of its laughing heir, the Enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievably
fading, and the idea of duty in one's calling prowls about in our lives like the
ghost of dead religious beliefs. Where the fulfillment of the calling cannot directly
be related to the highest spiritual and cultural values, or when, on the other hand,
it need not be felt simply as economic compulsion, the individual generally aban-
dons the attempt to justify it at all. In the field of its highest development, in the
United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning,
tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually
give it the character of sport. No one knows who will live in this cage in the
future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new
prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if
neither, mechanized petrifaction, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-
importance. For the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly
said: 'Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines
that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved' ” (Weber,
Protestant Ethic
, 181-182).
31. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 143.
32. Jürgen Habermas, “Two Hundred Years' Hindsight,” in
Perpetual Peace:
Essays on Kant's Cosmopolitan Ideal
, ed. James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-
Bachmann (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 124.
33.
1
Cant
\'kant\
n
1:
monotonous talk filled with platitudes
2
: hypocritically
pious language
3:
the special vocabulary peculiar to the members of an under-
world group: ARGOT
4:
whining speech, such as that used by beggars
5:
the
special terminology understood among the members of a profession, discipline,
or class but obscure to the general population: JARGON
2
cant
vi
[Anglo-Norman
cant
, song, singing, fr.
canter
, to sing, fr. L
cantare
]
1:
To speak tediously or sen-
tentiously: MORALIZE
2:
To speak in argot or jargon
3:
to speak in a whining,
pleading tone.
34. François Jacob,
Of Flies, Mice, and Men
, trans. Giselle Weiss (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 96. Originally published as
La Souris, la
mouche et l'homme
(Paris: Editions Odile Jacob, 1997).
35. “The first surprise resulted from comparing developmental genes in a range
of organisms. Or rather, from attempting to find out whether genes similar to
those known to act as master switches in the fly exist elsewhere. . . . For example,
there seemed to be little chance of finding the famous Hom genes (the genes that
in
Drosophila
establish the anteroposterior axis of the body) in organisms other
than insects, because their embryonic development is so different. But geneticists
looked around anyway, just to make sure. And wonder of wonders! They found
them everywhere. First in the frog. Then in the mouse. Then in humans, the leech,
the nematode, in amphioxus and hydra. In short, in every animal examined, a
group of genes was found that presented a structure that was similar to that of
