Naked Genes (MIT Press): Reinventing the Human in the Molecular Age

The interaction between new forms of biological life and new forms of social life in modern democracies.
The molecular life sciences are making visible what was once invisible. Yet the more we learn about our own biology, the less we are able to fit this knowledge into an integrated whole. Life is divided into new sub-units and reassembled into new forms: from genes to clones, from embryonic stages to the building-blocks of synthetic biology. Extracted from their scientific and social contexts, these new entities become not only visible but indeed “naked”: ready to assume an essential status of their own and take on multiple values and meanings as they pass from labs to courts, from patent offices to parliaments and back. 
In Naked Genes, leading science scholar Helga Nowotny and molecular biologist Giuseppe Testa examine the interaction between these dramatic advances in the life sciences and equally dramatic political reconfigurations of our societies. Considering topics ranging from assisted reproduction and personalized medicine to genetic sports doping, they reveal both surprising continuities and radical discontinuities between the latest advances in the life sciences and long-standing human traditions.

Naked Genes: Reinventing the Human in the Molecular Age

Science & Math

Nowotny, Helga

Testa, Giuseppe

Biological Sciences

Mit Pr

Insatiable Curiosity: Innovation in a Fragile Future (Inside Technology)

Curiosity is the main driving force behind scientific activity. Scientific curiosity, insatiable in its explorations, does not know what it will find, or where it will lead. Science needs autonomy to cultivate this kind of untrammeled curiosity; innovation, however, responds to the needs and desires of society. Innovation, argues influential European science studies scholar Helga Nowotny, tames the passion of science, harnessing it to produce "deliverables." Science brings uncertainties; innovation successfully copes with them. Society calls for both the passion for knowledge and its taming. This ambivalence, Nowotny contends, is an inevitable result of modernity. In Insatiable Curiosity, Nowotny explores the strands of the often unexpected intertwining of science and technology and society. Uncertainty arises, she writes, from an oversupply of knowledge. The quest for innovation is society's response to the uncertainties that come with scientific and technological achievement. Our dilemma is how to balance the immense but unpredictable potential of science and technology with our acknowledgement that not everything that can be done should be done. We can escape the old polarities of utopias and dystopias, writes Nowotny, by accepting our ambivalence--as a legacy of modernism and a positive cultural resource.

History & Philosophy

An influential scholar in science studies argues that innovation tames the insatiable and limitless curiosity driving science, and that society's acute ambivalence about this is an inevitable legacy of modernity.Curiosity is the main driving force behind scientific activity. Scientific curiosity, insatiable in its explorations, does not know what it will find, or where it will lead. Science needs autonomy to cultivate this kind of untrammeled curiosity; innovation, however, responds to the needs and desires of society. Innovation, argues influential European science studies scholar Helga Nowotny, tames the passion of science, harnessing it to produce “deliverables.” Science brings uncertainties; innovation successfully copes with them. Society calls for both the passion for knowledge and its taming. This ambivalence, Nowotny contends, is an inevitable result of modernity. In Insatiable Curiosity, Nowotny explores the strands of the often unexpected intertwining of science and technology and society. Uncertainty arises, she writes, from an oversupply of knowledge. The quest for innovation is society's response to the uncertainties that come with scientific and technological achievement. Our dilemma is how to balance the immense but unpredictable potential of science and technology with our acknowledgement that not everything that can be done should be done. We can escape the old polarities of utopias and dystopias, writes Nowotny, by accepting our ambivalence―as a legacy of modernism and a positive cultural resource.

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

The interaction between new forms of biological life and new forms of social life in modern democracies.
The molecular life sciences are making visible what was once invisible. Yet the more we learn about our own biology, the less we are able to fit this knowledge into an integrated whole. Life is divided into new sub-units and reassembled into new forms: from genes to clones, from embryonic stages to the building-blocks of synthetic biology. Extracted from their scientific and social contexts, these new entities become not only visible but indeed “naked”: ready to assume an essential status of their own and take on multiple values and meanings as they pass from labs to courts, from patent offices to parliaments and back. 
In Naked Genes, leading science scholar Helga Nowotny and molecular biologist Giuseppe Testa examine the interaction between these dramatic advances in the life sciences and equally dramatic political reconfigurations of our societies. Considering topics ranging from assisted reproduction and personalized medicine to genetic sports doping, they reveal both surprising continuities and radical discontinuities between the latest advances in the life sciences and long-standing human traditions.

MIT Press]

After the Breakthrough: The Emergence of High-Temperature Superconductivity as a Research Field

The discovery of high-temperature superconductivity was hailed as a major scientific breakthrough, inducing an unprecedented wave of excitement and expectation among the scientific community and in the international press. This book sets this research breakthrough in context, and reconstructs the history of the discovery. The authors analyze the emergence of this new research field and the way its development was shaped by scientists and science policy makers. They also examine the various institutional and national settings in which the research was undertaken as well as considering the scientific backgrounds and motivations of researchers who entered the field following the original discovery.

Felt, Ulrike

Cambridge University Press

Physics

The Changing Face of Welfare (Studies in Social Policy and Welfare, 27)

Evers, Adalbert

Gower Pub.Co.

Time: The Modern and Postmodern Experience

First published in 1989 by Suhrkamp Verlag as Eigenzeit Entstehung und Strukturierung eines Zeitgefnhls , this study observes that the development of industrialism was based upon a linear and abstract conception of time which is today supplanted by a vastly different temporal system. The author analyzes the implications of modern communication and the social institutions associated with it, showing that a specific time perspective centered in the individual expresses a yearning for forms of experience that are subversive of established institutional patterns. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Psychology & Counseling

Polity Pr

"Helga Nowotny's exploration of the forms and meaning of time in contemporary life is panoramic without in any way partaking of the blandness of a survey. From the artificial time of the scientific laboratory to the distinctively modern yearning for one’s own time, she regards every topic in this wide-ranging book from a fresh angle of vision, one which reveals unsuspected affinities between the bravest, newest worlds of global technology and the most ancient worlds of myth." --Lorraine Daston, University of Chicago 
This book represents a major contribution to the understanding of time, giving particular attention to time in relation to modernity. The development of industrialism, the author points out, was based upon a linear and abstract conception of time. Today we see that form of production, and the social institutions associated with it, supplanted by flexible specialization and just-in-time production systems. New information and communication technologies have made a fundamental impact here. But what does all this mean for temporal regimes? How can we understand the transformation of time and space involved in the bewildering variety of options on offer in a postmodern world? The author provides an incisive analysis of the temporal implications of modern communication. She considers the implications of worldwide simultaneous experience, made possible by satellite technologies, and considers the reorganization of time involved in the continuous technological innovation that marks our era. In this puzzling universe of action, how does one achieve a 'time of one's own'? The discovery of a specific time perspective centred in the individual, she shows, expresses a yearning for forms of experience that are subversive of established institutional patterns. This brilliant study, became a classic in Germany, will be of interest to students and professionals working in the areas of social theory, sociology, politics and anthropology.

Polity

Re-Thinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty

Re-Thinking Science presents an account of the dynamic relationshipbetween society and science. Despite the mounting evidence of amuch closer, interactive relationship between society and science,current debate still seems to turn on the need to maintain a 'line'to demarcate them. The view persists that there is a one-waycommunication flow from science to society - with scant attentiongiven to the ways in which society communicates with science.The authors argue that changes in society now make suchcommunications both more likely and more numerous, and that this istransforming science not only in its research practices and theinstitutions that support it but also deep in its epistemologicalcore. To explain these changes, Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons havedeveloped an open, dynamic framework for re-thinking science.The authors conclude that the line which formerly demarcatedsociety from science is regularly transgressed and that theresulting closer interaction of science and society signals theemergence of a new kind of science: contextualized orcontext-sensitive science. The co-evolution between society andscience requires a more or less complete re-thinking of the basison which a new social contract between science and society might beconstructed. In their discussion the authors present some of theelements that would comprise this new social contract.

Scott, Peter B.

Gibbons, Michael T.

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Books by Nowotny, Helga

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Nowotny, Helga. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Naked Genes: Reinventing the Human in the Molecular Age

Insatiable Curiosity: Innovation in a Fragile Future (Inside Technology)

Insatiable Curiosity: Innovation in a Fragile Future (Inside Technology)

Naked Genes (MIT Press): Reinventing the Human in the Molecular Age

After the Breakthrough: The Emergence of High-Temperature Superconductivity as a Research Field

After the Breakthrough: The Emergence of High-Temperature Superconductivity as a Research Field

The Changing Face of Welfare (Studies in Social Policy and Welfare, 27)

Time: The Modern and Postmodern Experience

Time: The Modern and Postmodern Experience

Re-Thinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty