ABSTRACT
This part introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters. The part deals with the moral problems of genetic testing and genetic discrimination. It provides a number of interesting and important observations on the way academic and industrial scientists working in the field of biotechnological research construe the value of their work. The part suggests that in the face of the ongoing transformation of the economy and, with it, the university, the academic researcher needs to develop a distinct vision of the role of his work and its contribution to the public good. It describes new strategies in biopolitics that combine technologies of risk and of uncertainty shaping a space of governance in which practices of individual self-control connect with imperatives of political-institutional decision-making. While the risk-problematic in sociology for some time and “sociology of risk” has been established, career of “risk” as a legal concept has become familiar only in the last decade.
