Figure 3 Representation of Norwegian moral/social sphere

It is this sphere that the biotechnologists are excluded from, and which regulators are ambivalently trying to include them within. The amorality espoused by – or embedded in – biotechnologists and genetic technologies cannot be easily judged in reference to the dominant axis of moral values; they are too different, confusing, neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad’. Like ‘pure’ scientific knowledge, biotechnology is external, and threatening, to the social (see Sirnes 1996 for further discussion of the asocial role of scientific knowledge in Norway).