Helga Nowotny and Giuseppe Testa Naked Genes: Reinventing the Human in the Molecular Age, translated by Mitch Cohen, MIT Press, Cambridge (MA), 2011

In May 2005, the President's Council on Bioethics, a group of experts assembled by US President George W. Bush in late 2001 to explore the moral significance of recent developments in the biomedical sciences, released a White Paper on Alternative Sources of Human Pluripotent Stem Cells (The President's Council on Bioethics, 2005). In its letter of transmittal to the president, the council announced that it had continued to ponder the ethical challenges posed by biomedical research on human stem cells since its most recent report on the controversial issue (The President's Council on Bioethics, 2004). As the chairman Leon R. Kass explained, the council had taken a ‘keen interest’ especially in recent suggestions that new technologies might offer a way around the vexed ethical problem of producing embryonic stem cells for biomedical research. Among the suggestions extensively discussed in the White Paper was a method termed as Altered Nuclear Transfer. This method apparently allows scientists to combine the standard techniques of nuclear transfer with those of genetic engineering to produce pluripotent stem cells without concomitantly creating an embryonic human being. Before transferring the somatic cell nucleus to the denucleized egg cell, a gene essential for further development is deliberately disabled. The biological entity crafted by means of Altered Nuclear Transfer would thus be deprived of the capabilities of a normal human embryo. The artificially designed biological artefact lacking the distinctive character of an embryo would be so crippled that it could never develop into a fully formed human being.

In a 2005 article, William B. Hurlbut, an ethicist at the Stanford University Medical Center and member of the President's Council on Bioethics, observed that the acceptance of Altered Nuclear Transfer implicitly requires ‘an acknowledgment of the moral neutrality of biological systems or entities that have only partial developmental potential’ (Hurlbut, 2005). As an ethicist, there are good reasons to believe that this biological form of crippled life manufactured in the laboratory by means of genetic engineering might indeed constitute a ‘morally neutral object’. If it is true, as Hurlbut suggests, that the ethical problem posed by contemporary stem cell research might be resolved by the construction of a crippled creature, then how can one make sure that such a creature has really been crafted in the test tube? A technical solution to the problem, as it turns out, is already at hand. In a 2006 article published in Nature, Alexander Meissner and Rudolf Jaenisch of the Whitehead Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology proposed to tag the disabled gene with a green fluorescent protein (Meissner and Jaenisch, 2006). The glowing protein, Meissner and Jaenisch reasoned in their article, offers a simple and straightforward way of selecting the right nuclei for eventual transfer and thus ensures that the right creatures have been crafted in the test tube. In the emerging biomedical arena of the twenty-first century, moral concerns are switched off by means of genetic engineering (Franklin, 2001). What the bright green light released by a fluorescent protein ostensibly signals is the successful neutralization of a moral object.

In their co-authored book, Naked Genes: Reinventing the Human in the Molecular Age, social scientist Helga Nowotny and molecular biologist Giuseppe Testa explore in detail, and from a number of perspectives, the curious norms and forms of life that are taking shape today at the heart of the biomedical complex. Nowotny was Chair of the European Research Advisory Board of the European Commission and is now President of the European Research Council. She is a Professor emeritus of Social Studies of Science at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich and the author of a large number of influential publications on science and technology (Gibbons et al, 1994; Nowotny et al, 2001; Nowotny, 2005). Her co-author, Giuseppe Testa, is a molecular biologist and science studies scholar. He currently leads the Laboratory for Stem Cell Epigenetics at the European Institute for Oncology in Milan. Testa is also the co-founder of an interdisciplinary PhD program and a member of the Ethics and Public Policy Committee of the International Society for Stem Cell Research. These two distinguished authors are thus perfectly situated to explore the lights and shadows of our molecular age.

In a key chapter of their book, entitled ‘Contested Futures’, Nowotny and Testa discuss in detail what they suggest calling ‘human technologies’. These human technologies are ‘complementary and mutually supporting’, and their main task is to ‘stabilize the social order, which the offerings of the life sciences threaten to put out of joint’. The challenge, in other words, is to construct appropriate forms of life for the new life forms that are increasingly brought into being in the artificial environment of the biological laboratory (Rabinow, 1999). Nowotny and Testa chose to focus on those human technologies that are currently available globally, among them the human technology of ‘law’, the human technology of ‘governance’ and the human technology of ‘ethics’. The purpose of these technologies, Nowotny and Testa underscore, is to ‘integrate the newly created life forms and other biological entities into society in a way that permits an acceptable coexistence between humans and the artefacts they create’. Human technologies establish modes of classification and standards of evaluation that serve as common reference points for contexts that would remain incomparable otherwise. Needless to say, the human technologies of ‘law’, ‘governance’ and ‘ethics’ have come to play a crucial role in the global dissemination of biomedical practices (Rose, 2007).

The curious objects brought into being in the biological laboratory today – from human embryos, to tissue cultures and gene sequences – need to be qualified, and ‘law’ constitutes one prominent arena in which biological objects are transformed into juridical entities (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006). What the human technology of ‘law’ primarily allows is to articulate and negotiate the ambivalent characteristics of emerging biological objects. ‘As soon as a successful standardization (and legal stabilization) is achieved’, Nowotny and Testa observe, ‘the controversies themselves recede into the background’. What this optimistic account tends to overlook, however, is that the ‘law’ (in its dominant Euro-American form) may not actually constitute a neutral language for conflict resolution. On the contrary, the language of the ‘law’ concomitantly contributes to the diffusion of a view of the person as a ‘possessive legal individual’. More often than not it is precisely this peculiar understanding of the person as an individual that prevents a successful resolution. ‘The law’, Marilyn Strathern once observed, ‘is baffled by a body within a body; it does not know how many persons a pregnant woman is’ (Strathern, 2005; Boltanski, 2004). Modernist legal thought and practice both open up and close down social, cultural and political possibilities.

What Nowotny and Testa underscore in their account of the ‘law’ is that one should never allow it to yield to special interests. The law must preserve its own independence by all means. This is equally true when it comes to ‘scientific facts’. The ‘law’, Nowotny and Testa maintain, should not ‘directly adopt either scientific evidence or scientific definitions and apply them normatively’. It must, on the contrary, ‘carry out its own creative activity of lawmaking and legal practice’ and remain independent of powerful scientific interests. The protection and preservation of such independence, however, is no easy matter. The controversial public debate over the patentability of biological organisms and gene sequences is quite revealing in this regard (Rabinow, 1996). For what the US law increasingly adopted in the past two decades is a particular kind of ‘scientific evidence’. As Hannah Landecker has shown, descriptions of scientific practice gradually changed once biological organisms became patentable subject matter in the early 1980s. What Landecker suggests is that once biological organisms became redefined as potentially patentable subject matter, descriptions of scientific practice were reconfigured by the anticipation of this possible future. As Landecker argues, ‘this future anterior state, in which practice is carried out with an eye to what will have to be demonstrated in order for the object to qualify as patentable, constitutes the mutual transformation of definition and practice’ (Landecker, 1999). In her account, Landecker demonstrates how the registers of the legal and the factual increasingly became deeply entangled. Scientists began to provide accounts of their own practice in terms that neatly matched those of US patent law. A juridical terminology began to lend ‘rhetorical form to scientific explanation’, as Landecker puts it in her critical account (Landecker, 1999). Descriptions of scientific research highlighting multiple dimensions of human intervention became crucial elements in public accounts of scientific practice. A legal argument was written into scientific research so it could be referenced again in the court room.

In addition to ‘law’, the human technology of ‘ethics’ has recently emerged as a powerful form increasingly regulating and modulating the national and international production, circulation and distribution of biological objects. According to Nowotny and Testa, ‘ethics’ translates the ‘widest possible spectrum of often mutually exclusive interests of a growing number of actors into political options and manages the resulting interdependencies’. In its institutionalized and professionalized form, ‘ethics’ has become a universally applicable currency enabling the global dissemination of biomedical practices. ‘Its principles are flexible enough and have proven their ability to adjust successfully to new circumstances’, Nowotny and Testa note. Taking a limited range of presumably universally valid ends such as ‘autonomy’, ‘beneficence’ and ‘justice’ for granted, ‘ethics’ presents itself as a ‘neutral technology’. Its aim is to find the most efficient means to achieve a set of predetermined ends. What ‘ethics’ provides, therefore, is a standardized, quasi-legal discursive form, enabling the seamless circulation of organs, cells and genes across various social, cultural and political boundaries.

What is distinctive about both the human technology of ‘law’ and the human technology of ‘ethics’ is that these technologies are both increasingly dominated by a formal rationality primarily concerned with efficiency. As a result of this development, the public debate about controversial issues has gradually shifted away from an evaluation of ends to a consideration of means. Mobilized by the biopolitical state and its bureaucratic apparatus, the human technology of ‘law’ and the human technology of ‘ethics’ have become essential parts of a normalizing machinery (Rabinow, 2003). Revealing the substantial limits of the dominant understanding of ethical discourse as a flexible instrument of governance, Nowotny and Testa challenge us to imagine a different kind of ethical practice. What must be avoided by all means is the current tendency to confine the scope of the ethical to a set of predetermined values and to a question of deliberation and judgment (Faubion, 2001). For the inevitable result of such a reductionist account of the ethical is the profound alienation of individuals, so distinctive of the liberal subject, whose relation to ‘his’ or ‘her’ values can only be conceived of in terms of ‘his’ or ‘her’ personal choice. This choice has – literally – no substance at all (MacIntyre, 1984). What Nowotny and Testa's astute account of the molecular age demonstrates is that the time has come to considerably enlarge our understanding of the ethical as a distinctive form of practice irreducible to the dominant concern with questions of governance. The purpose of such a practice is not the neutralization of moral objects by means of technical innovation but the cultivation of ethical dispositions by means of critical reflection. Naked Genes is a fine book not least because it substantively contributes to this important task.