Overview

"Scientists, investors, policymakers, the media and the general public have all displayed a continuing interest in the commerical promise and potential dangers of genetic engineering. In this book, Herbert Gottweis explains how genetic engineering became so controversial. Beginning with an exposition of poststructuralist theory and its implications for research methodology, Gottweis offers an approach to political analysis, emphasizing the essential role of narratives in the development of policy under contemporary conditions. Drawing on more than eighty in-depth interviews and extensive archival work, Gottweis traces today's controversy back to the sociopolitical and scientific origins of molecular biology, paying particular attention to its relationship to eugenics. He argues that a number of mutually reinforcing political and scientific strategies have attempted to turn genes into objects of technological intervention - to make them ""governable"". Gottweis argues that it was the struggle over the boundaries and representations of genetic engineering, politics and society that have defined the political dynamics of the drafting of risk regulations in these countries. In a chapter on biotechnology research, industry, and supporting technologies policies, Gottweis demonstrates that the interpretation of genetic engineering as the core of a new ""high technology"" industry was part of a policy myth and an expression of idenitity politics. He suggests that under postmodern conditions a major strategy for avoiding policy failure is to create conditions that ensure tolerance and respect for the multiplicity of socially available policy narratives and reality interpretations."

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9780262071895

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Gottweis has written a wide-ranging political history of the early decades of biotechnology policy in Europe. This is an important contribution to post-structuralist scholarship on policymaking. For those who think that regulating genetic engineering is just a matter of getting the science right, this book will come as a revelation. --Sheila Jasanoff, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

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