In laboratories all over the world, life -- even the idea of life -- is changing. And with these changes, whether they result in square tomatoes or cyborgs, come transformations in our social order -- sometimes welcome, sometimes troubling. Changing Life offers a close look at how the mutable forms and concepts of life link the processes of science to those of information, finance, and commodities.

These essays -- about planetary management and genome sequencing, ecologies and cyborgs -- address actual and imagined transformations at the center and at the margins of transnational relations,...