ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how the biotechnology regime has amassed its momentum. It discusses how the practice of reducing the world to highly mobile "objects"-a technique first employed by early naturalists centuries ago-has brought actors together to do biotechnology. Medieval theologians believed the careful observation of natural objects for their own sake to be a vice. Scholastic philosophy during this period argued that the book of nature provided little more than an access point into our own spiritual content. The chapter determines what has been said about inscription so as to make more explicit the importance of this practice for patent law and biotechnology in particular. Representations to emerge out of the genomic sciences thus possess qualities unavailable in earlier techno-science proxies. Genetic representations exist in a state significantly removed from the biological, spatial, and temporal parameters that had for millennia governed plant life and the transmission of genetic material.
