"Making PCR" is the fascinating, behind-the-scenes account of the invention of one of the most significant biotech discoveries in our time the polymerase chain reaction. Transforming the practice and potential of molecular biology, PCR extends scientists' ability to identify and manipulate genetic materials and accurately reproduces millions of copies of a given segment in a short period of time. It makes abundant what was once scarce the genetic material required for experimentation. "Making PCR" explores the culture of biotechnology as it emerged at Certus Corporation during the 1980s...
"Making PCR" is the fascinating, behind-the-scenes account of the invention of one of the most significant biotech discoveries in our time the polymer...
In 1993, an American biotechnology company and a French genetics lab developed a collaborative research plan to search for diabetes genes. But just as the project was to begin, the French government called it to a halt, barring the laboratory from sharing something never previously thought of as a commodity unto itself: French DNA.
In 1993, an American biotechnology company and a French genetics lab developed a collaborative research plan to search for diabetes genes. But just as...
This study of power/knowledge in France, from the 1830s through the 1930s, uses the tools of anthropology, philosophy, and cultural criticism to examine how the social environment was described. It aims to show how modernity was revealed in urban planning, architecture, and social legislation.
This study of power/knowledge in France, from the 1830s through the 1930s, uses the tools of anthropology, philosophy, and cultural criticism to exami...
Michel Foucault was one of the most influential philosophical thinkers in the contemporary world, someone whose work has affected the teaching of half a dozen disciplines ranging from literary criticism to the history of criminology. But of his many books, not one offers a satisfactory introduction to the entire complex body of his work. The Foucault Reader was commissioned precisely to serve that purpose. The Reader contains selections from each area of Foucault's work as well as a wealth of previously unpublished writings, including important material written especially for this volume,...
Michel Foucault was one of the most influential philosophical thinkers in the contemporary world, someone whose work has affected the teaching of half...
This is a new edition of the well-received Interpretive Social Science (California, 1979), in which Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan predicted the increasing use of an interpretive approach in the social sciences, one that would replace a model based on the natural sciences. In this volume, Rabinow and Sullivan provide a synthetic discussion of the new scholarship in this area and offer twelve essays, eight of them new, embodying the very best work on interpretive approaches to the study of human society.
This is a new edition of the well-received Interpretive Social Science (California, 1979), in which Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan predic...
In this landmark study, now celebrating thirty years in print, Paul Rabinow takes as his focus the fieldwork that anthropologists do. How valid is the process? To what extent do the cultural data become artifacts of the interaction between anthropologist and informants? Having first published a more standard ethnographic study about Morocco, Rabinow here describes a series of encounters with his informants in that study, from a French innkeeper clinging to the vestiges of a colonial past, to the rural descendants of a seventeenth-century saint. In a new preface Rabinow considers the...
In this landmark study, now celebrating thirty years in print, Paul Rabinow takes as his focus the fieldwork that anthropologists do. How valid is the...
This collection of essays explains and encourages new reflection on Paul Rabinow's pioneering project to anthropologize the West. His goal is to exoticize the Western constitution of reality, emphasize those domains most taken for granted as universal, and show how their claims to truth are linked to particular social practices, hence becoming effective social forces. He has recently begun to focus on the core of Western rationality, in particular the practices of molecular biology as they apply to our understanding of human nature. This book moves in new directions by posing questions...
This collection of essays explains and encourages new reflection on Paul Rabinow's pioneering project to anthropologize the West. His goal is to ex...
The discipline of anthropology is, at its best, characterized by turbulence, self-examination, and inventiveness. In recent decades, new thinking and practice within the field has certainly reflected this pattern, as shown for example by numerous fruitful ventures into the "politics and poetics" of anthropology. Surprisingly little attention, however, has been given to the simple insight that anthropology is composed of claims, whether tacit or explicit, about anthropos and about logos--and the myriad ways in which these two Greek nouns have been, might be, and should be, connected....
The discipline of anthropology is, at its best, characterized by turbulence, self-examination, and inventiveness. In recent decades, new thinking a...
Fiscal Disobedience represents a novel approach to the question of citizenship amid the changing global economy and the fiscal crisis of the nation-state. Focusing on economic practices in the Chad Basin of Africa, Janet Roitman combines thorough ethnographic fieldwork with sophisticated analysis of key ideas of political economy to examine the contentious nature of fiscal relationships between the state and its citizens. She argues that citizenship is being redefined through a renegotiation of the rights and obligations inherent in such economic relationships.
The...
Fiscal Disobedience represents a novel approach to the question of citizenship amid the changing global economy and the fiscal crisis o...
A Machine to Make a Future represents a remarkably original look at the present and possible future of biotechnology research in the wake of the mapping of the human genome. The central tenet of Celera Diagnostics--the California biotech company whose formative work during 2003 is the focus of the book--is that the emergent knowledge about the genome, with its profound implications for human health, can now be turned into a powerful diagnostic apparatus--one that will yield breakthrough diagnostic and therapeutic products (and, potentially, profit). Celera's efforts--assuming...
A Machine to Make a Future represents a remarkably original look at the present and possible future of biotechnology research in the wa...
