The anthropology of genetic science: from new technology to the blurring
of identity boundaries
Convenor: Angela Procoli
Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale
52, rue Cardinal Lemoine
75005 Paris, France
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Fax: +33 1 44 27 17 66
The workshop aims to focus on the contemporary developments in the
scientific understanding of genetics and the ways these developments are
transforming the possible relations between humans and their natural
environnement. Recent advances in the applications of genetic science raise
important sociological and ethical issues (patentability of the living,
reductionism and biological determinism, social discrimination based on
biology) and have significant implications in the way of representing the
"living"`. To what extent does the remarkable progress of biotechnology
challenge the validity, in the western area of time-honoured borderlines
between human, animal and plant life. As it becomes clear that basic
biological mechanisms apply beyond the species barrier, a unifying view of
the world of the living begins to emerge. Transgenic plants in which animal
genes have been included, laboratory animals with a human component for the
production of therapies or xenografts go to show that as biotechnologies
burst into the world of food and health, they take part in the blurring of
well established categories and raise the issue, vital as it is for western
man, of the redefinition of nature. To draw out these issues, contributions
may discuss examples in plant and animal genetic engineering (genetically
modified food, cloning, transgenetics) and in human genetics (genetic
testing, antenatal screening, cloning, genetic therapy, xenografts).
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