Publishing: Taylor & Francis Group

The new genetics, including genetic engineering, and the mapping and sequencing of the human genome as well as other species, is a new technology unlike any other in the direct and deeply personal effects it has on everyone. It also grows and develops in a complex political, economic and organisational milieu, involving key social institutions, in the context of late modern society characterised by reflexivity and globalisation. While it can be thought to pose a threat to the boundaries which conventionally define selfhood and distinguish humans from other animals, it also opens the way to new approaches to health, medicine, family life, industry, commerce, and the law. It may generate potentially novel risks and dangers, with possibly unforseen, and often unknowable or irreversible outcomes, while it questions accepted understandings of culture and society. The new genetic technologies are rapidly developing as the key to understanding social change in to the next century.

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