BiblioVault - Books about Genetic Engineering

The Case against Perfection

Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering

Michael J. Sandel

Harvard University Press, 2007

“Sandel explores a paramount question of our era: how to extend the power and promise of biomedical science to overcome debility without compromising our humanity. His arguments are acute and penetrating, melding sound logic with compassion.”
—Jerome Groopman, author of How Doctors Think

Breakthroughs in genetics present us with a promise and a predicament. The promise is that we will soon be able to treat and prevent a host of debilitating diseases. The predicament is that our newfound genetic knowledge may enable us to manipulate our nature—to enhance our genetic traits and those of our children. Although most people find at least some forms of genetic engineering disquieting, it is not easy to articulate why. What is wrong with re-engineering our nature?

The Case against Perfection explores these and other moral quandaries connected with the quest to perfect ourselves and our children. Michael Sandel argues that the pursuit of perfection is flawed for reasons that go beyond safety and fairness. The drive to enhance human nature through genetic technologies is objectionable because it represents a bid for mastery and dominion that fails to appreciate the gifted character of human powers and achievements. Carrying us beyond familiar terms of political discourse, this book contends that the genetic revolution will change the way philosophers discuss ethics and will force spiritual questions back onto the political agenda.

In order to grapple with the ethics of enhancement, we need to confront questions largely lost from view in the modern world. Since these questions verge on theology, modern philosophers and political theorists tend to shrink from them. But our new powers of biotechnology make these questions unavoidable. Addressing them is the task of this book, by one of America’s preeminent moral and political thinkers.

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Eugenia

A Fictional Sketch of Future Customs

Eduardo Urzaiz, Edited and translated by Sarah A. Buck Kachaluba and Aaron Dziubinskyj

University of Wisconsin Press, 2016

A little-known gem of utopian/dystopian fiction published in 1919 tells

the story of a eugenically engineered society of the future.

It is the year 2218. In "Villautopia," the capital of a Central American nation, the

state selects young, biologically desirable citizens to act as breeders. Embryos

are implanted in males to increase a flagging population rate, and the offspring

are raised in state facilities until old enough to choose their own, nonnuclear

families. Sterilization of children with mental or physical abnormalities further

ensures the purity of the gene pool.

Written two years before Yevgeny Zamyatin's We and twelve years before

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Eugenia recounts the story of Ernesto, who at age twenty-three is selected as a breeder. Celiana, his thirty-eight-year-old lover

and an accomplished scholar, is deemed unfit for reproduction. To cope with

her feelings of guilt and hopelessness, she increasingly turns to marijuana, and

her scholarly productivity declines. Meanwhile Ernesto falls in love with a fellow

breeder, a young woman named Eugenia—but the life they ultimately choose is

not quite what the state had envisioned.

Taking up important challenges of modern society—population growth,

reproductive behavior and technologies, experimentation with gender roles,

and changes in family dynamics—Eugenia is published here in English for the

first time. Sarah A. Buck Kachaluba and Aaron Dziubinskyj provide a critical

apparatus helping readers to understand the novel's literary genesis and genealogy

as well as its historical context. Arising from its twentieth-century origins, yet

remarkably contemporary, Eugenia is a treasure of speculative fiction.

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Hybrid Child

A Novel

Mariko Ohara

University of Minnesota Press, 2018

A classic of Japanese speculative fiction that blurs the line between consumption and creation when a cyborg assumes the form and spirit of a murdered child

Until he escaped, he had been called “Sample B #3,” but he had never liked this name. That would surprise them—that he could feel one way or another about it. He was designed to reshape himself based on whatever life forms he ingested; he was not made to think, and certainly not to assume the shape of a repair technician whose cells he had sampled and then simply walk out of the secure compound.

Artificial Intelligence is all too real in this classic of Japanese science fiction by Mariko Ōhara. Jonah, a child murdered by her mother, has become the spirit of an AI-controlled house where the rogue cyborg once known as Sample B #3 takes refuge and, making a meal of the dead girl buried under the house, takes Jonah’s form. On faraway Planet Caritas, an outpost of human civilization, the female AI system that governs society has become insane. Meanwhile, the threat of the Adiaptron Empire, the machine race that #3 was built to fight, remains.

With the familiar strangeness of a fairy tale, Ōhara’s novel traverses the mysterious distance between body and mind, between the mechanics of life and the ghost in the machine, between the infinitesimal and infinity. The child as mother, the mother as monster, the monster as hero: this shape-shifting story of nourishment, nurture, and parturition is a rare feminist work of speculative fiction and received the prestigious Seiun (Nebula) Award in 1991. Hybrid Child is the first English translation of a major work of science fiction by a female Japanese author.

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The Recombinant University

Genetic Engineering and the Emergence of Stanford Biotechnology

Doogab Yi

University of Chicago Press, 2015

The advent of recombinant DNA technology in the 1970s was a key moment in the history of both biotechnology and the commercialization of academic research. Doogab Yi’s The Recombinant University draws us deeply into the academic community in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the technology was developed and adopted as the first major commercial technology for genetic engineering. In doing so, it reveals how research patronage, market forces, and legal developments from the late 1960s through the early 1980s influenced the evolution of the technology and reshaped the moral and scientific life of biomedical researchers.

Bay Area scientists, university administrators, and government officials were fascinated by and increasingly engaged in the economic and political opportunities associated with the privatization of academic research. Yi uncovers how the attempts made by Stanford scientists and administrators to demonstrate the relevance of academic research were increasingly mediated by capitalistic conceptions of knowledge, medical innovation, and the public interest. Their interventions resulted in legal shifts and moral realignments that encouraged the privatization of academic research for public benefit. The Recombinant University brings to life the hybrid origin story of biotechnology and the ways the academic culture of science has changed in tandem with the early commercialization of recombinant DNA technology.

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