Judith Roof: The Poetics of DNA (2007)

25 November 2009, dusan

Reveals the ideological effects of DNA metaphors and stories.

How has DNA come to be seen as a cosmic truth, representative of all life, potential for all cures, repository for all identity, and end to all stories? In The Poetics of DNA, Judith Roof examines the rise of this powerful symbol and the implications of its ascendancy for the ways we think—about ourselves, about one another, and about the universe.

Descriptions of DNA, Roof argues, have distorted ideas and transformed nucleic acid into the answer to all questions of life. This hyperbolized notion of DNA, inevitably confused or conflated with the “gene,” has become a vector through which older ways of thinking can merge with the new, advancing long-discredited and insidious ideas about such things as eugenics and racial selection and influencing contemporary debates, particularly the popular press obsession with the “gay gene.” Through metaphors of DNA, she contends, racist and homophobic ideology is masked as progressive science.

Grappling with twentieth-century intellectual movements as well as contemporary societal anxieties, The Poetics of DNA reveals how descriptions of DNA and genes typify a larger set of epistemological battles that play out not only through the assumptions associated with DNA but also through less evident methods of magical thinking, reductionism, and pseudoscience.

For the first time, Roof exposes the ideology and cultural consequences of DNA and gene metaphors to uncover how, ultimately, they are paradigms used to recreate prejudices.

Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 2007
ISBN 0816649979, 9780816649976
Length 243 pages

More info (publisher)
More info (google books)

PDF

Mitchell Whitelaw: Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life (2004)

7 October 2009, dusan

“Artificial life, or a-life, is an interdisciplinary science focused on artificial systems that mimic the properties of living systems. In the 1990s, new media artists began appropriating and adapting the techniques of a-life science to create a-life art; Mitchell Whitelaw’s Metacreation is the first detailed critical account of this new field of creative practice.

A-life art responds to the increasing technologization of living matter by creating works that seem to mutate, evolve, and respond with a life of their own. Pursuing a-life’s promise of emergence, these artists produce not only artworks, but generative and creative processes: here creation becomes metacreation.

Whitelaw presents a-life art practice through four of its characteristic techniques and tendencies. “Breeders” use artificial evolution to generate images and forms, in the process altering the artist’s creative agency. “Cybernatures” form complex, interactive systems, drawing the audience into artificial ecosystems. Other artists work in “Hardware,” adapting Rodney Brooks’s “bottom-up” robotics to create embodied autonomous agencies. The “Abstract Machines” of a-life art de-emphasize the biological analogy, using techniques such as cellular automata to investigate pattern, form and morphogenesis.

In the book’s concluding chapters, Whitelaw surveys the theoretical discourses around a-life art, before finally examining emergence, a concept central to a-life, and key, it is argued, to a-life art.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2004
ISBN 0262232340, 9780262232340
281 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2012-8-11)

John Sulston, Georgina Ferry: The Common Thread: A Story of Science, Politics, Ethics, and the Human Genome (2002)

18 August 2009, dusan

The world was agog when scientists made the astounding announcement that they had successfully sequenced the human genome. Few contributed so directly to this feat as John Sulston. This is his personal account of one of the largest international scientific operations ever undertaken.

It was a momentous occasion when British scientist John Sulston embarked on the greatest scientific endeavor of our times: the sequencing of the Human Genome. In The Common Thread, Sulston takes us behind the scenes for an in-depth look at the controversial story behind the headlines. The accomplishments and the setbacks along with the politics, personalities, and ethics that shaped the research are frankly explored by a central figure key to the project.

From the beginning, Sulston fervently proclaimed his belief in the free and open exchange of the scientific information that would emerge from the project. Guided by these principles, The Human Genome Project was structured so that all the findings were public, encouraging an unparalleled international collaboration among scientists and researchers.

Then, in May 1998, Craig Venter announced that he was quitting the Human Genome Project with plans to head up a commercial venture launched to bring out the complete sequence three years hence, but marketed in a proprietary database. Venter s intentions, clearly anathema to Sulston and the global network of scientists working on the Project, marked the beginning of a dramatic struggle to keep the human genome in the public domain.

More than the story of human health versus corporate wealth, this is an exploration of the very nature of a scientific quest for discovery. Infused with Sulston s own enthusiasm and excitement, the tale unfolds to reveal the scientists who painstakingly turn the key that will unlock the riddle of the human genome. We are privy to the joy and exuberance of success as well as the stark disappointments posed by inevitable failures. It is truly a wild and wonderful ride.

The Common Thread is at once a compelling history and an impassioned call for ethical responsibility in scientific research. As the boundaries between science and big business increasingly blur, and researchers race to patent medical discoveries, the international community needs to find a common protocol for the protection of the wider human interest. This extraordinary enterprise is a glimpse of our shared human heritage, offering hope for future research and a fresh outlook on our understanding of ourselves.

Publisher Joseph Henry Press, 2002
ISBN 0309084091, 9780309084093
Length 310 pages

More info (publisher)
More info (google books)

PDF