Modest_Witness

Here's what I've gotten out of Haraway so far (not that she actually comes out and says anything like this...):

What ultimately makes bioengineering/biotechnology exciting and terrifying is that through bioengineering we are changing the very language with which we understand the world and ourselves.

"The distinction between nature and culture in Western societies has been a sacred one; it has been at the heart of the great narratives of salvation history and their genetic transmutation into sagas of secular progress. What seems to be at stake is this culture's stories of the human place in nature...Transgressive border-crossing pollutes lineages—in a transgenic organism's case, the lineage of nature itself—transforming nature into its binary opposite, culture" (60).

So if Nature is the opposite to Culture, the Other against which we define and defend ourselves, then if we turn Nature into Culture (through OncoMice and the like), then we lose ourselves, our definition of human as that which is not animal. If there's no distinction between humanity and nature, then there isn't either.

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The revised patent definition that allows "human authorship, attained merely by modifying or creating a gene and relegating all the rest of the biological entity to irrelevance, is dependent on the doctrine of genetic programming, where the genome alone is seen as the master designer or natural author of the whole organism" (90). It seems a weird thing, to be able to patent bits of life, but on the other hand it is just an extension of what we do with all the rest of the natural world: take any bit of it, add human labor and financial capital, and now you have something as value and therefore something potentially patentable. It's how our economic system works. Take something of no value (bit of nature), add something of value (labor, money), produce something of value. Perhaps what makes it really scary has to do with this blurring of the boundaries. If we can apply that economic equation to bits of life, that means we can apply it to ourselves, and THAT means we can end up being the part of the equation that has no value rather than the part (labor, money) that does.