: About Me

Paracelsus's homunculi and Asimov's robots: the laboratory ethics of personhood and artificial life in medieval and modern thought. What is the most important thing about living beings? This question, abstract and philosophical as it sounds, has direct applicability to questions of bioethics and roboethics in the modern world. Genetic engineering, in a sometimes spectacular fashion, breaches the boundary between real and artificial creatures. The FDA, despite pleas from consumers, has proven completely unable to come up with a definition for "natural". (12) Even the question Do clones have...