Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Friedrich Nietzsche's “last men”). On ultimate philosophical matters
science is therefore mute, though as a training in disciplined thought it
does contribute to the ideal of clarification, which for Rabinow, under-
pins the primary virtue of an ethos of maturity: responsibility.
Rabinow does not flinch from recognizing the complicity of modern
science and scientists in the “gravest betrayals,” as Jürgen Habermas puts
it, of reason and responsibility over the last hundred years. But, he warns,
this should not tempt us to an irrationalism or rejection of the scientific
ethos. Science, as Freud and Weber made clear even in the midst of last
century's horrors, remains a vocation and an inspiration for a humanity
devoted to peace and the overcoming of the Thanatos instinct. In our
own time, molecular biology and biochemistry have emerged as new and
fresh challenges to the remnants of a universal narcissism in contempo-
rary human beings. And though these sciences are ineluctably inter-
twined with the state and increasingly dependent on the largesse of
multinationals, this calls not for rolling back research but for serious
reflection on the moral and political consequences of this situation. More
important, Rabinow contends, is what we have learned from biology
over the past decade or so—namely, that at the genetic level, all forms
of life are materially the same, and that the technology central to this
discovery demands “further intervention into that materiality.” In the
shift in the 1990s from a focus on genes to the production, mapping,
and sequencing of DNA, a “new industrial mode of operation” has been
instituted in molecular biology, which in turn has led to a rethinking of
the gene as the locus of a DNA sequence as opposed to its reification in
classical genetics. The next exciting step will entail seeing when genes
are switched on and off, and for what duration, since we now know, as
the geneticist Sydney Brenner observes, that evolution proceeds “by
modulating the expression of genes” and not by “enlarging the protein
inventory.”
Thus, while genetic mapping and sequencing have neither yielded the
meaning of life (such metanarratives are in Rabinow's view alien to
science and hence unsuitable for our time) nor ushered in eugenics,
biology today does raise the question of human nature by demonstrat-
ing our similarities with all living things (recall Sagoff's point about how
little we differ genetically from yeast). The inevitable intervention into
our genetic constitution therefore requires rigorous reflection on the
