The Nature of Biotechnology: Toward a Critical Civic Response
One of the most powerful and problematic developments within the biological sciences in the last 25 years has been the growth of basic scientific knowledge and technological manipulation of life at the genetic and cellular levels. Spurred by the mapping and sequencing of the genome of many plant and animal species, including human beings, and by the growing efficacy of the direct, controlled, rapid manipulation of DNA, biotechnology has become a form of bio-power in agriculture, animal breeding, and human medicine unprecedented in history.
The purpose of this project is to explore and to critically reexamine the philosophical assumptions that underlie contemporary biotechnology and the social and ethical implications of its corresponding biopower. Biotechnology has grown up along a fault line in the life sciences, with paradigms of molecular genetics, biochemistry, and related disciplines having little or no fruitful interchange with the disciplines of evolutionary or conservation biology, and ecology. What then are the underlying ontological assumptions of biotechnology? Do they constitute a form of reductionism and do they ignore basic perspectives of holistic and systemic interactions? What are the natural and social-policy implications of this ontological and epistemological commitment?
Without concerted attention to such questions, the intellectual reception of biotechnology and molecular biology has produced a weak and distorted general state of scientific literary among the general public—which seems to accept the reductionism and determinism of genetics and biotechnology virtually without question or critique—and as a consequence of that, a low level civic concern and responsibility at the grassroots level. To be sure, many concerns have been raised about the ecological implications of the various applications of biotechnology—as well as its social and ethical implications—but thus far civic literacy and a civically responsible response to the governance and regulation of biotechnology has been lacking.
In keeping with the Center for Humans and Nature’s mission and approach, this project will be focused on fundamental assumptions concerning the philosophy of nature and fundamental human responsibilities given our ability—for good or ill—to intervene so massively and rapidly in the evolutionary and ecological processes upon which all life depends. Are biotechnology and biopower predicated on a conception of “nature” that is real, viable, and deserving of respect, or are they based on a mistaken worldview? How can the capacity to critically assess (with solid factual information and conceptual rigor) the claims and activities of biotechnology be more fully developed the democratic citizenry at large? What lessons might be learned from grassroots movements in other countries as they have responded to aspects of biotechnology such as genetically modified foods?