General Catalog 2024-25

Lecture, three hours. Technical manipulation of living matter from humans, animals, and plants as scientific and social undertaking. How biotechnology came into existence. Questions, controversies, and changes that come with ability to make living technologies. Rise of engineering ideal in American biology. Biological modernism, ideas of immortality and technical suppression of death, molecularization of life, genetic engineering, food biotechnology, and control of reproduction. Practice and perception of living bodies as factories and machines. Changing economic and legal infrastructure of biological invention. Unfolding of contemporary social controversies concerning biotechnology. Letter grading.