Human cloning in film: horror, ambivalence, hope

Fictional filmic representations of human cloning have shifted in relation to the 1997 announcement of the birth of Dolly the cloned sheep, and since therapeutic human cloning became a scientific practice in the early twentieth century. The operation and detail of these shifts can be seen through an analysis of the films The Island (2005) and Aeon Flux (2005). These films provide a site for the examination of how these changes in human cloning from fiction to practice, and from horror to hope, have been represented and imagined, and how these distinctions have operated visually in fiction, and in relation to genre

Living Dead Networks

This essay explores, through a series of condensed modules, the ways in which contagion operates in both biological and informational networks.Through an examination of the fields of information security and medical surveillance, computer viruses and mathematical epidemiology, and pathogenic information and informed pathogens, this essay asks how the political relation between 'control' and 'emergence' is formed in networks in which the distinction between information and biology breaks down

The Post-Genomic Era Has Already Happened

This paper provides a critical analysis of contemporary molecular biotechnology, focusing on the fields of genomics and bioinformatics. In doing so, it raises questions concerning the ways in which computerization, economics, and race/ethnicity affect and are affected by current research. Beginning with two key events in the biotechnology industry - the announcement of the completion of the sequencing of the human genome, and the first total annotation of human genome data - this essay discusses the intersecting developments in both biotechnology research, as well as "infotech" or information technology research. It goes on to highlight critically several of the scientific assumptions which still inform much of contemporary biotechnology research, which in turn lead to distinct historical phases of molecular biotechnology. Each of these historical phases is characterized by some relationship between the technical concept of "information" and the scientific concept of a molecular genetic code. With this background, the paper then goes on to consider, on a theoretical level, some primary policy issues, including genetic privacy, human adult cloning, and research of human embryonic stem cells. The essay ends with a consideration of the ways in which "genetic difference" and polymorphisms (types of alterations in a species-defined genome) relate to our cultural conceptions of race and ethnicity

Criptobiologies

Aquest assaig tracta de la relació entre animalitat i biotecnologia, i se centra tant en qüestions contemporànies, com ara la "biodefensa", com en qüestions històriques, com ara el bestiari medieval. L'animalitat -com a capacitat humana de "pensar l'animal"- es troba entre les xarxes i conductes que tant constitueixen com amenacen la vida social, econòmica i política