Guadian Newspaper (London) discusses Armand Marie Leroi’s book, Mutants, which today won Guardian First Book Award. The book sounds novel, even in a field filled with impressive research from different disciplines. Leroi is thoughtful about the ways in which those with mutations talk about themselves, and about the role of mutation in the description and social meanings of ‘normalcy’ for a variety of traits. He does actually reach a strange conclusion about one of the more obvious mutants of the past decade, Dolly, and he’s no big fan of scientists doing ethics:
What Mutants emphatically is not is a disquisition on the ethics of our ability to influence mutation. “I considered the matter, and discovered that I had nothing original to say about Dolly the sheep or stem cells,” he says. “I’ve no particular expertise in this area, and there’s a lot of people gassing on about it, and much of the discussion seems to me misguided and beside the point. I’m quite strongly of the view that scientists have no particular ethical authority in these debates.”
Labels: books, defining disease, defining normal, mutants, who has ethical authority?