That concern about human genetics is at the top of many lists of issues requiring intense discussion from scientific, political, social, and ethical points of view is today no surprise. It was in the spirit of attempting to establish the basis for intelligent discussion of the issues involved that a group of us gathered at a meeting of the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology in the Summer of 1995 at Brandeis University and began an exploration of these questions in earlier versions of the papers presented here. Our aim was to cross disciplines and...

Messy. Clumsy. Volatile. Exciting. These words are not often associated with the sciences, which for most people still connote exactitude, elegance, reliability, and a rather plodding certainty. But the real story is something quite different. The sciences are less about the ability to know and to control than they are about the unleashing of new forces, new capacities for changing the world. The sciences as practiced exist not in some pristine world of "objectivity," but in what Mike Fortun and Herb Bernstein call "the muddled middle." This book explores the way science makes sense of the...

That concern about human genetics is at the top of many lists of issues requiring intense discussion from scientific, political, social, and ethical points of view is today no surprise. It was in the spirit of attempting to establish the basis for intelligent discussion of the issues involved that a group of us gathered at a meeting of the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology in the Summer of 1995 at Brandeis University and began an exploration of these questions in earlier versions of the papers presented here. Our aim was to cross disciplines and...