From Genes to Genomes: Concepts and Applications of DNA TechnologyRapid advances in our understanding of genetics have required that new books contain topics such as the concept and theory of gene cloning, transgenics, genomics, and various other coverage of traditional and contemporary subjects.
Although there is an abundance of textbooks that cover introductory genetics and advanced courses in genetics, there is a noticeable gap at the intermediate (second year) level. In the past gene structure, function and expression were taught at final year /postgraduate level, but the rapid advances in our understanding of genetics has encouraged courses to change considerably.
Rationality and the Genetic Challenge: Making People Better?
Should we make people healthier, smarter, and longer-lived if genetic and medical advances enable us to do so? Matti Häyry asks this question in the context of genetic testing and selection, cloning and stem cell research, gene therapies and enhancements.
Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life examines construction, manipulation and re-definition of life in contemporary technoscientific culture. It takes a critical political view of the concept of life as information, tracing this through the new biology and the changing discipline of artificial life and its manifestation in art, language, literature, commerce and entertainment. From cloning to computer games, and incorporating an analysis of hardware, software and 'wetware', Sarah Kember demonstrates how this relatively marginal field connects with, and connects up global networks of information systems. As well as offering suggestions for the evolution of [cyber]feminism in Alife environments, the author identifies the emergence of posthumanism; an ethics of the posthuman subject mobilized in the tension between cold war and post-cold war politics, psychological and biological machines, centralized and de-centralized control, top-down and bottom-up processing, autonomous and autopoietic organisms, cloning and transgenesis, species-self and other species. Ultimately, this book aims to re-focus concern on the ethics rather than on the 'nature' of life-as-it-could-be.
