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Sheila Jasanoff is Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Trained in law at Harvard Law School, she is the author of many books on the role of science and technology in the politics of modern democratic societies, including Science at the Bar, The Fifth Branch, and Risk Management and Political Culture.

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"Designs on Nature is a brilliant book that represents a major contribution to a vast and growing literature on biotechnology and bioethics. Professor Jasanoff tackles a complex topic with ease and humor that will appeal to students, scholars, and decision makers. There is nothing else available that comes close to her rich and detailed analysis."--Paulette Kurzer, University of Arizona, author of Markets and Moral Regulation

"Jasanoff provides an excellent guide to the public and political issues arising from biotechnology while also addressing the wider context of scientific governance and what has become known as the 'public understanding of science.' She makes a powerful and persuasive case both for the social and political significance of biotechnology and for a specific form of scholarly analysis that is both theoretically informed and empirically aware. Highly readable and very informative for those who have little background knowledge of these issues (and indeed for those with substantial background), this book will become the standard text on the political management of biotechnology and the politics of science and technology more broadly."--Alan Irwin, University of Liverpool, author of Sociology and the Environment and Citizen Science

"Using the interdisciplinary resources of Science and Technology Studies in an intellectually subtle, rigorous, and empirically sensitive way across three different national arenas, Sheila Jasanoff here provides an unequalled comparative perspective on the common yet differential struggles of modern political cultures and their institutions to get to grips with the challenges of controlling biological scientific knowledge practices in the public interest. She deftly exposes and insightfully explores the twin projects wherein modern scientific knowledge and its institutional and cultural contexts tacitly coproduce each other, whilst constructing the domains of scientific knowledge and cultural politics as if categorically distinct. A further key twist is provided by Jasanoff in the exposure of the tacit processes whereby policy and scientific institutions at the same time produce imagined idioms of their respective publics and democratic cultural arenas. This book offers crucial resources, and challenges, to several disciplines, notably political science, public law, anthropology, policy analysis and sociology--not to mention to the life sciences themselves."--Brian Wynne, Lancaster University

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Designs on Nature

Princeton University Press

Chapter One

Biotechnology politics and policy are situated at the intersection of two profoundly destabilizing changes in the way we view the world: one cognitive, the other political. This unique position makes the project of using the life sciences to improve the human condition anything but straightforward. It also makes biotechnology a particularly apposite lens through which to compare the triumphs and tribulations of late capitalistic technological democracies.

On the cognitive front, the shift is from a realist to a constructivist view of knowledge. Years of work on the social construction of science and technology, and the contingency of similarity and difference judgments, have taught us to be skeptical of absolutist claims concerning objectivity and progress. Scientific knowledge, it is now widely accepted, does not simply accumulate, nor does technology invariably advance benign human interests. Changes in both happen within social parameters that have already been laid down, often long in advance. In the field of environmental regulation, for example, concepts of risk and safety, methods of compiling and validating data, ideas of causation and blame, and (crucially for biotechnology) even the boundary between "nature" and "culture" have all been shown to reflect deep-seated social assumptions that rob them of universal validity. The methods with which policymakers carry on their business similarly cannot be taken as neutral, but must be seen as the result of political compromise and careful boundary maintenance, favoring some voices and viewpoints at others' expense. The criteria by which one measures policy success or failure are likewise products of negotiation; in applying them, one implicitly adopts contingent, locally specific standards of reliability and validity. The special authority of scientific claims is in competition with other representations of reality diffused through the global media, and scientific expertise is subject to appropriation by multiple, diffracted social identities and interests. Any attempt to compare the performance of national policy systems today must take these complexities into account.

On the political front, the shift is toward a fracturing of the authority of nation-states, with consequent pressures to rethink the forms of democratic governance. State sovereignty is eroding under the onslaught of environmental change, financial and labor mobility, increased communication, the global transfer of technical skills and scientific knowledge, and the rise of transnational organizations, multinational corporations, and social movements. Supranational concerns, such as the demand for free trade or globally sustainable development, are gaining political salience, but they are at the same time encountering resistance from tendencies toward greater local autonomy based on particularities of culture and place. As a result, the "old" politics of modernity-with its core values of rationality, objectivity, universalism, centralization, and efficiency-is confronting, and possibly yielding to, a "new" politics of pluralism, localism, irreducible ambiguity, and aestheticism in matters of lifestyle and taste.

These flows and movements have attenuated the connections between states and citizens, calling into question the capacity of national governments to discern and meet their citizens' needs. Yet we live in a time when knowledgeable citizens are more than ever demanding meaningful control over the technological changes that affect their welfare and prosperity. Many therefore see this epoch as a proving ground for new political orders whose success will depend, in part, on our learning to live wisely with our growing capacity to manipulate living things and our equally growing uncertainty about the consequences of doing so.

There is little question that genetic engineering, along with the cognitive, social, and material adjustments made to accommodate it, will form an essential part of the politics of the twenty-first century, just as it did of the political history of the preceding three decades. Attempts to deploy biotechnology for the public good, and to ensure democratic control over it, touch the political and cultural nerve centers of industrial nations in the global economy. These efforts are political in the sense that they centrally concern the production and distribution of societal benefits and risks; they are cultural in that, by intervening in nature, biotechnology forcefully impinges on social meanings, identities, and forms of life. Comparison among national and regional debates surrounding biotechnology should therefore help us identify and make sense of the wider political realignments that are taking place around us at this moment. Comparison may even help us decide which courses of action we wish to follow, as individuals or as political communities. But how should such a project be organized? What should we compare, using what methods, and with what ultimate hopes of illumination?

Comparison, particularly in the policy field, has historically been driven by a faith in the possibility of melioration through imitation. Analysts assumed that they could objectively evaluate which agency, nation, or political system was "doing better" at implementing particular policy goals; such findings then were supposed to assist policymakers elsewhere in deciding which course of action to follow. While one should not denigrate this practical ambition, one should likewise not take its feasibility for granted. With growing awareness of the culturally embedded character of both knowledge and policy, there are reasons to be skeptical of unproblematic learning from others' experiences. The insights gained from comparative analysis suggest, indeed, that neglecting cultural specificities in policymaking may be an invitation to failure within any political community's own terms of reference. Comparative studies of science and technology policy today need a different justification than simply the propagation of improved managerial techniques. Rather than prescribing decontextualized best practices for an imagined global administrative elite, comparison should be seen as a means of investigating the interactions between science and politics, with far-reaching implications for governance in advanced industrial democracies.

But if deeper social and political understanding is our goal, what conceptual tools should we bring to the task of comparison, and how should these differ from past approaches? This chapter lays out the case for a new kind of comparative analysis-one that retains nation states as units of comparison but is organized around the dynamic concept of political culture, rather than the more static categories of political actors, interests, or institutions. My aim is to explore the links among knowledge, technology, and power within contemporary industrial democracies and to display these links from the standpoints of those situated within particular cultures of action and decision. This approach illuminates how political culture plays out in technological debates and decisions-most particularly how it affects the production of public knowledge, constituting what I call the civic epistemologies of modern nation states. The methods I adopt for this purpose owe as much to the history and sociology of knowledge and the anthropology of technological cultures as...