Juan Manuel Torres

The importance of genetic services for the theory of health: a basis for an integrating view of health

The first part of this article shows that oureffective means to know and modify directly thehuman genetic make-up generates singular anddifficult situations for the application offundamental medical categories. Specifically,we demonstrate that in dealing with thesesituations, some predominant views on health,such as descriptivism or that which reduces thestate of health to not having presentdisabilities, cannot provide adequate answerseither from the point of view of medicalscience or in terms of our ordinary intuitions.The second part of the article examines thereasons for the failure of these views totackle the mentioned situations, proposessolutions to urgent problems and, finally,offers some foundations for an alternativetheoretical development, id est, for atheory of health able to satisfactorilyintegrate our genetic dimension.

The Influence of Genetics on Contemporary Thinking

This volume reflects on the effects of recent discoveries in genetics on a broad range of scientific fields. In addition to neuroscience, evolutionary biology, anthropology and medicine, contributors analyze the effects of genetics on theories of health, law, epistemology and philosophy of biology. Social and moral concerns about the relationship between genetics, society and the individual also figure prominently. Genetic discoveries fuel central contemporary public policy debates concerning, for example, human cloning, equitable access to healthcare or the role of genetics in medicine. Perhaps more fundamentally, advances in genetics are altering our perception of human life and death.An interview with Francois Jacob by Anne Fagot-Largeault opens the volume. In this interview, Jacob, who shared a Nobel Prize with Andre Lwoff and Jacques Monod for their discoveries concerning genetic control of enzyme and virus synthesis, addresses many of the central methodological epistemological and ethical questions covered in the volume. The dynamic interdisciplinary character of this volume makes it relevant to scholars from many disciplines, from biology, philosophy and the social sciences.

GENETICS AND SOCIETY: A DIFFERENT VIEW

Some questions that could be asked regarding the revolution of genetics would be the following: what is its real influence on the conceptual network of the social sciences, if any? Are there in the scientific network, social or cultural concepts whose meanings have been modified substantially by this revolution? And, if so, to what extent? A first step in order to answer these questions is to determine what is meant by ‘revolution of genetics’. Once this is answered by the identification of some knowledges and technologies characterizing this scientific phenomenon, we shall demonstrate that the effect of the revolution of genetics on other disciplines – such as the theory of health – causes a conceptual change that should be considered as a Kuhnean shift in a certain way. In this article we explore this connection in a way that differs from other approaches that usually consider the relations between genetics and society in terms of eugenic policies or those of the geneticization process, by focusing on the impact that genetic technologies have on the notions of health and unhealth

Competing research programmes on the origin of life

SummaryDuring the course of its short history the discipline concerned with the origin of life has given birth to several scientific programmes in the Lakatosian sense, two of the most prominent and widespread being those initiated by Oparin (life began from protein entities) and Muller-Haldane (life began from genetic entities). The present paper sets down the abses for the rational reconstruction of both views by identifying theirhard core and some of their successivedevelopments. An assessment is made of the various stages in the evolution of these programmes with respect to the crucial Lakatosian notions ofprogressivity andregressivity and of how their arguments stand up against one another. This epistemological analysis also establishes the internal reasons why the RNA version of thegenotype programme (developed in particulr by L. Orgel and S. Spiegelman) has today taken on a progressive character and enjoys recognition by the international scientific cvommunity.