Imagining the Consequences of Human Biotechnology

Given that there are huge uncertainties about how contemporary advances in human biotechnology are going to affect human life, different scholars try to understand the situation in different ways. This essay reviews four recent books devoted to fostering a fundamental ethical, philosophical, and practical understanding of the issues related to the use of genetic technologies in the human medical field. Each of these books sees these issues from different perspectives and provides different understandings of the issues through a distinct process of analysis. While the first three books provide significant theoretical insights about the consequences of contemporary biotechnological advances, explaining them from different philosophical perspectives and contexts, the fourth book shows how bioethics itself is being instrumentalized in the United States in favor of scientific and medical practices.