Review:
"Designing Human Practices is a very significant, quite brilliantly conceived, at times quite fascinating, and always thought-provoking project. It both documents a particularly complex history of an experimental project in natural/human science engagement and provides a bracing and at times daunting set of schematics for thinking through not only the specifics of the SynBERC project but also its broader resonances."--Donald Brenneis, University of California, Santa Cruz-- (10/17/2011)
"Designing Human Practices is a remarkable and original book. As 'embedded' humanists at the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center, Paul Rabinow and Gaymon Bennett tried to live up to the impossible task of, at the same time, sounding out what synthetic biology might mean for future forms of human life and analytically reflecting, designing, and redesigning their own engagement, which they understood as a kind of real-time anthropological 'experiment, ' obviously not to the pleasure of their scientist partners. If Michel Foucault, so the authors claim, can be understood as having aimed at shaping the conceptual tools for a History of the Present as a diagnosis of our times, then Rabinow and Bennett see their task, with respect to the sciences of today, as designing an Anthropology of the Contemporary in the sense of a 'therapeutically' active, remediative, interventionist, and transformative engagement of the human sciences with the life sciences."--Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Max Planck Institute
About the Author:
Paul Rabinow is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He has written numerous books, including Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology and The Accompaniment: Assembling the Contemporary, both published by the University of Chicago Press. Gaymon Bennett is a senior research fellow at the Center for Biological Futures at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. He is coauthor of Sacred Cells? Why Christians Should Support Stem Cell Research.
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