Sheila Jasanoff is Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School
By its very terms of inquiry, Can Science Make Sense of Life? highlights critical epistemological perversions in our present governance of biotechnology: confusions between decoding genetic structures and engineering happiness, conflations of privately profitable patent interests and overall human betterment, elisions between raw data and techno-optimism's myth-making capacity. As multinational investments in decoding life have mushroomed in recent years, a narrow range of laboratory science has increasingly arrogated to itself exclusive power to make sense of biological life by misapplying social constructs borrowed from life in cultural, political and legal realms. Founder of Harvard's Science and Technology Studies program, Sheila Jasanoff makes urgent and eloquent case for restoring broadly democratic humanistic complexity to the governing bodies that govern our bodies. Patricia Williams, Columbia Law School