The Sum of (Bio)technologies: Practices of Assisted Reproduction as a Space of Social Transformation and Ethical Calls

Article

Abstract

[In Russian]

The new millennium moved us solidly into a brave new world when the human genetic code was cracked in the year 2000, outlining the biochemical recipe, encoded in DNA, for manufacturing and operating a complete human being. This new world is characterized by extensive reconfiguration of life itself, a spectacular blurring of categories and a bewildering complexity of biosocial realities and associated technologies. The article seeks to determine the nature of the social consequences that have followed the deployment of new technologies, pointing at the increasingly complex relationship between ‘the human’ and ‘the technological’, addresses the ethical and political questions arising from the constant transformation and manipulation of humanity, by means of reinforcing the powers of medicalization and progressive rates of a social demand for associated technologies, based on biotechnological breakthroughs. Assisted reproductive technologies (ART) could be approached as a profoundly contradicted and highly dynamic function that links culture, biology and nature.