Designs on Nature

Designs on Nature is a brilliant book that represents a major contribution to a vast and growing literature on biotechnology and bioethics. Professor Jasanoff tackles a complex topic with ease and humor that will appeal to students, scholars, and decision makers. There is nothing else available that comes close to her rich and detailed analysis. -- Paulette Kurzer, University of Arizona, author of "Markets and Moral Regulation" Jasanoff provides an excellent guide to the public and political issues arising from biotechnology while also addressing the wider context of scientific governance and what has become known as the 'public understanding of science.' She makes a powerful and persuasive case both for the social and political significance of biotechnology and for a specific form of scholarly analysis that is both theoretically informed and empirically aware. Highly readable and very informative for those who have little background knowledge of these issues (and indeed for those with substantial background), this book will become the standard text on the political management of biotechnology and the politics of science and technology more broadly. -- Alan Irwin, University of Liverpool, author of "Sociology and the Environment and Citizen Science" Using the interdisciplinary resources of Science and Technology Studies in an intellectually subtle, rigorous, and empirically sensitive way across three different national arenas, Sheila Jasanoff here provides an unequalled comparative perspective on the common yet differential struggles of modern political cultures and their institutions to get to grips with the challenges of controlling biological scientific knowledge practices in the public interest. She deftly exposes and insightfully explores the twin projects wherein modern scientific knowledge and its institutional and cultural contexts tacitly coproduce each other, whilst constructing the domains of scientific knowledge and cultural politics as if categorically distinct. A further key twist is provided by Jasanoff in the exposure of the tacit processes whereby policy and scientific institutions at the same time produce imagined idioms of their respective publics and democratic cultural arenas. This book offers crucial resources, and challenges, to several disciplines, notably political science, public law, anthropology, policy analysis and sociology--not to mention to the life sciences themselves. -- Brian Wynne, Lancaster University

Compares the politics and policy of the life sciences in Britain, Germany, the United States, and in the European Union as a whole. This book shows how public and private actors in each setting evaluated manifestations of biotechnology and tried to reassure themselves about their safety.Biology and politics have converged today across much of the industrialized world. Debates about genetically modified organisms, cloning, stem cells, animal patenting, and new reproductive technologies crowd media headlines and policy agendas. Less noticed, but no less important, are the rifts that have appeared among leading Western nations about the right way to govern innovation in genetics and biotechnology. These significant differences in law and policy, and in ethical analysis, may in a globalizing world act as obstacles to free trade, scientific inquiry, and shared understandings of human dignity. In this magisterial look at some twenty-five years of scientific and social development, Sheila Jasanoff compares the politics and policy of the life sciences in Britain, Germany, the United States, and in the European Union as a whole. She shows how public and private actors in each setting evaluated new manifestations of biotechnology and tried to reassure themselves about their safety. Three main themes emerge. First, core concepts of democratic theory, such as citizenship, deliberation, and accountability, cannot be understood satisfactorily without taking on board the politics of science and technology. Second, in all three countries, policies for the life sciences have been incorporated into "nation-building" projects that seek to reimagine what the nation stands for. Third, political culture influences democratic politics, and it works through the institutionalized ways in which citizens understand and evaluate public knowledge. These three aspects of contemporary politics, Jasanoff argues, help account not only for policy divergences but also for the perceived legitimacy of state actions.