ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the historical relation between molecular biology, gene technology and medicine, and focuses on some aspects of its consequences in the context of the human genome project. One of the leading narratives of Enlightenment philosophy in general and of the modern sciences in particular has been to conceive of the development of human society as liberating womankind from the constraints of nature. Between roughly 1940 and 1970, a new paradigm had been established in biology: molecular biology. The advent of gene technology, genetic engineering or, as some prefer to say, applied molecular genetics, since the beginning of the 1970s has effected a decisive prospective change in the relation between molecular biology and medicine. The momentum of gene technology is based on the prospects of an intracellular representation of extracellular projects - the potential of “rewriting” life.
